


A Night With No Moon

by SecondStarOnTheLeft



Series: The Moment You Doubt Whether You Can Fly [3]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Explicit Torture, Mind Control
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-08
Updated: 2018-04-15
Packaged: 2018-08-07 11:53:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 22,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7713916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SecondStarOnTheLeft/pseuds/SecondStarOnTheLeft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“We’re <em>Healers</em>, not <em>Aurors</em>,” Monterys Velaryon says, fear and fright balancing in his cut-glass voice and setting Sansa’s teeth on edge. “We can’t be expected to defend the bloody hospital from <em>Dragonborn</em>.”</p><p>An assault on Saint Mungo's throws the whole world right open, and Sansa finds herself on the fracture lines.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Cut glass

**Now**

 

“We’re  _ Healers,  _ not  _ Aurors,” _ Monterys Velaryon says, fear and fright balancing in his cut-glass voice and setting Sansa’s teeth on edge. “We can’t be expected to defend the bloody hospital from  _ Dragonborn.” _

Sansa watches the Healers proper, in their lime green robes, as they assemble across the reception. The charmed doors are straining against the onslaught of hexes from outside, warping into rainbow shards of reality and spell.

Sansa’s robes are the tourmaline blue of a Healer-in-training, but her wand works just as well as any Healer’s, and she’s better at defensive charmwork than anyone else in Britain, except maybe Mum.

“I expect it of myself, Monterys,” she says, stepping forward and tucking her sleeves back on themselves, to free up her hands, before drawing her wand from its holster along her thigh. “But then,  _ I’m  _ not the next best thing to a Targaryen, am I?”

Her wand is English oak, ten and a half inches, firm but not unyielding - her core is unicorn hair,  _ for your pure heart,  _ Joffrey used to sneer.

Faint heart never won fair lady, Sansa’s heard, but maybe a pure heart or two can win this war.

“We want to be Healers,” she says, settling into the duelling stance she and Robb used to copy from watching Lya and Ben practice, years and years ago. A more practical stance than the formal stance Joy Lannister has taken up, a firmer stance than the loose set of Durran Bar Emmon’s feet on the tiled floor. “More than that, we want to be Healers in  _ Saint Mungo’s.” _

“Your point, Stark?” Monterys says, and Sansa flashes him a smile before the fear can set in.

“If we don’t stand and fight,” she says, “there might not  _ be _ a Saint Mungo’s.”

 

_ Before _

 

“So  _ you’re  _ the newest Stark to join the roster,” someone says, coming to halt at Sansa’s table. She’s finding it a little harder than she’d like to make friends in Ravenclaw - she comes from a long, steady line of Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs on both sides, and while she’s always been a little wary of classifying a person’s personality on the basis of their house, well, Ravenclaw is just very different to what she’s used to. It’s much quieter, if nothing else.

The boy standing in front of the table, where she’s sitting alone in a shadowed corner of the library, is blonde, and good-looking, and wearing a Gryffindor tie.

“Joff Baratheon,” he says. “I hear your old man and mine were close, back in the day.”

Sansa doesn’t say that Dad and Robert Baratheon are  _ still  _ close, but that they don’t visit one another because Mum can’t stand Robert’s beautiful, mean-spirited wife. She doesn’t say that she’s met Joffrey before, half a dozen times, or that she’s fairly sure that Arya and his sister are best friends, because Dad brings Arya to that underage Quidditch club in Edinburgh twice a week and Arya always talks about a girl called  _ Cella  _ when she comes back.

Instead, Sansa smiles, because she really does need to make some friends, and doesn’t care that Joffrey is a year older than her and in a different house.

“Sansa Stark,” she says. “I hear your old man was the best Beater Gryffindor ever saw, back in the day.”

A little flattery, she knows, will get you anywhere, and Joffrey’s smile is worth the very slight lie - she’s not been here a full month and she already knows that  _ Robb _ is shaping up to be the best Beater Gryffindor has ever seen. 

“I take after my mother’s family more,” Joffrey says, picking dust that Sansa can’t see from his robes. “A Seeker - or at least, I  _ should _ be. But you know how it is.”

Robb is enough older than Sansa that she doesn’t really know how it is - he’s in fourth year, with fourth year friends and fourth year gossip, and she can’t always follow the thread of whatever he’s telling her. She does know, however, that the current Gryffindor Seeker is a Blackwood, and that he’s  _ good. _ The kind of good that Arya will be, eventually.

“I’m sure,” she says, because that seems diplomatic and inoffensive.

“Do you play?” he asks, but he doesn’t give her a chance to answer. “I hope not - I’ve never approved of girls playing Quidditch. It’s much too rough and tumble.”

Sansa thinks of Arya, flying rings around Robb and Jon and Uncle Ben over the orchard, of Aunt Lyanna, who could have gone on to play professionally if it hadn’t been for the Scandal, of Mum, even, Mum who’d led the Hufflepuff team to two consecutive Quidditch Cups in her sixth and seventh years at Hogwarts.

“Oh, really?” she says, because he must be joking, and he gives her another of those good-looking smiles, so it’s alright, really.

Isn’t it? Everyone makes concessions to make friends, don’t they?

 

**Now**

 

There are tabs in the sleeves of their robes, to hold back the wide cuffs when they need to get their hands dirty - Sansa ties hers off with a flick of her wand, and does Durran’s when she sees that his hands are shaking. 

“We can’t let them breach the lobby,” Head Healer Martell says - his wheelchair creaks, but no one looks doubtful of his capability. They’ve all seen that wheelchair in action, and more importantly, they all know Doran Martell. The staff of Saint Mungo’s trust one another implicitly, in a way that had stunned Sansa at first, and she’s thankful of it now.

Her wand feels heavy in her hand, suddenly, and she’s beside Willas without thinking about it. There are others drifting in among the Healers, too, blue robes dark and too few between the green, but she stays firmly where she is, guarding his weak left - his false leg hasn’t half the bells and whistles of Healer Martell’s chair, after all. 

“You could leave now,” he tells her, out of the side of his mouth. His eyes flash to hers, behind his glasses and around hers. “You could Apparate out, Sansa, to safety, or to get help-”

“I saw your Patronus leave the moment the alarms sounded,” she says, nudging her arm very slightly against his. “I don’t need to get help - you’ve already sent for it.”

The lobby is very quiet, then, as they all settle into position, as they all offer up whatever prayers they think necessary. Sansa wonders, for a second, just who Willas sent his Patronus to fetch - did he send it to his brother in the Auror Office, or to his father in the Minister’s office? Or maybe it was to his grandmother, at Hogwarts, to rouse Professor Lannister and Mum and all their allies?

It doesn’t matter. What matters is he sent it, but it’s not going to be quick enough. 

“When this is over,” he says, voice unusually uncertain, “and we’re both alive to laugh about it - we’re going to talk. We’re going to sit down and talk about everything, Sansa.”

She loosens her hold on her wand for just a second, lowers her arm so she can link her smallest finger with his for a heartbeat, and nods.

“We have to survive this first,” she reminds him, and he smiles.

“There is no way in hell I am going to let you die now, Sansa,” he assures her. “You’re not allowed to leave before we have that talk.”

 

_ Before _

 

Ravenclaw takes some settling, but she gets there, and she makes friends - a few, enough - and joins the Charms Club, which Mum runs, and the Duelling Club, because she may as well, and very much doesn’t even attempt to try out for Quidditch.

It’s not what Joffrey said - well, not entirely. Mostly it’s because she’s always been the worst flier in the family, and she doesn’t think that her housemates would laugh as kindly as her brothers and Arya always do. Sansa can’t stand being embarrassed, and she’s already been embarrassed three times since she started, and she’s not going to let it happen again.

It’s… It’s alright. That’s the best she can say, really - she likes her housemates, more or less, and she  _ loves _ her classes, especially Defence Against the Dark Arts and Charms, even though she’s only barely scraping what would count as an E in Defence Against the Dark Arts and Mum teaches Charms, which is almost embarrassing, sometimes.

It’s alright. So what if she’s a little lonely? So what if everyone else always says that Hogwarts is the best time of your life, where you make all your friends and find the person you’ll spend your life with?

It’s alright. Sansa doesn’t mind. She’s not even here a year yet - it’ll be  _ fine. _

 

**Now**

 

“We ought to sing,” someone says, and Sansa dreads what she knows is coming next almost as much as she does the inevitable fall of the doors. “We ought to sing something we all know, to keep morale up.”

“How absolutely dreadful,” Joy says, broad nose wrinkling, but she’s smiling, too, her startling eyes bright with fear and fight. “But there’s only one real choice, isn’t there, since the olds aren’t likely to know the Wyrd Sisters’ latest.”

Willas’ finger links around Sansa’s this time, as everyone begins to rumble through  _ Hoggy Warty Hogwarts,  _ and she smiles at him. He understands her reluctance, even if no one else ever seems to.

The song rolls to a close on Arwyn Oakheart’s brilliant soprano trill, as clear and sharp as cut glass, and then the great glass doors shatter inwards, in a hail of clear, sharp shards.

 

_ Before _

 

By the time she gets to third year, Sansa has a routine.

There’s class, and class is wonderful - she loves all of her lessons, even Potions, because no matter how much she might dislike Professor Baelish she  _ loves _ the peace of the dungeons, where everyone is too busy worrying about fudging their potions to chatter and gossip.

Sansa wonders, sometimes, why everything else isn’t as easy as her lessons are. She’s pretty and polite and charming, when she needs to be, and gets along well with everyone, but she doesn’t have many friends. Not really. She has Jeyne, but Jeyne is always worried and nervous and disappears for hours at a time with no warning, and she has Cley, but Cley is a genuine genius and is taking more classes than seems possible, unless he can travel through time, and is always in the Library doing homework. 

There’s Margaery, in Charms Club, but Margaery is Robb’s age, in  _ sixth  _ year, and she’s a prefect, too, will probably be Head Girl next year, and there are a few others in Charms Club, but they’re all either older, like Margaery, or younger, like Shireen.

It’s lonely. She’s grateful for having Joff, truth be told, because Joff is almost always free to talk to her.

“Looking good today, Stark,” he says, jumping up onto the corner of her table - she glances around to make sure Madame Eglatine isn’t nearby, because she disapproves of people sitting on tables - and leaning back on one hand. His tie is loose around his neck, and he’s very good-looking, and Sansa wishes she could drum up a little more enthusiasm, since he’s apparently the best looking boy in the school, after Robb. 

“Feeling better, Joff,” she says back, force of habit moving her tongue more than any real enthusiasm for their little routine. She isn’t feeling better, she’s feeling lonely and inadequate, and wishes she could sneak down to Mum’s office for a cup of tea and a hug, but Mum does her best to remain professional, while they’re at school, because she thinks it’s unfair that her kids have their mother about when no one else does. She wouldn’t even mind sitting down with Robb for some tea, but Robb always has Quidditch or friends or his girlfriend to worry about, and he’s in sixth year now, after all, a prefect and wanting to be Gryffindor Quidditch captain  _ and _ Head Boy next year, and aiming for all Os, too, in his N.E.W.T.s. “Quidditch?”

“Skipped it tonight,” he says, shrugging. He skips at least one Quidditch training a week, because he thinks he doesn’t need the practice. He  _ is  _ a good flier - a decent Chaser, if he’d pay more attention to Chasing and stop trying to do the Seeker’s job for her - but he needs more time in the air, with his team. “We’re just flying the same drills, over and over and over - it’s sickening, that we  _ need  _ this. Pathetic.”

It’s on the tip of her tongue to point out that running drills until your arms are numb builds muscle memory, so you don’t even need to think about this pass or that dodge. She says nothing, though, because it’s easier, and letting Joffrey pay attention to her is one of the few things that  _ is _ easy, at school. 

 

**Now**

 

Sansa throws up a Shield Charm without needing to think about it - her arm is out, movement complete, before she’s even said  _ “Protego!”,  _ and the glass runs down the shimmer of a wall like rain on frost.

The first curse thrown her way is- cutting, she thinks, she might have heard the spell but she can’t be sure, and she isn’t sure that her Shield will hold against it, so she dives - with one hand pressed to the small of Willas’ back, to make sure he hits the floor with her, instead of catching the curse. Something behind them shatters, porcelain chiming on the polished floor like a bell, signaling the start of the fight.

Sansa rolls to her knees and throws up another sudden shield, letting it hover for long enough that it deflects a hex of unknown origin so she can spin and cast a Leg-Locker at one of the masked bastards who are attacking the  _ hospital. _

If Sansa didn’t know just who was hidden away in one of the private rooms upstairs, guarded by a pair of Aurors on her door, she’d wonder why in Morgana’s name the idiots are attacking such a soft target - or maybe she wouldn’t. Their whole game is to scare everyone into submission, and there isn’t anything scarier than breaking down the doors of the most neutral ground in Britain. 

She hits another of them with a Stinging Hex when he raises his wand toward Aunt Lysa, and spares a second to watch him tear off his mask as his face swells like a puffer-fish. When that single second is up, she throws the fiercest  _ Steleus _ she can manage at the twit coming for Healer Swann, before stamping down as hard as she’s able on the front of her knee - she’s learned the hard way that there’s not a witch or wizard who won’t be confused by a little bit of Muggle rough-and-tumble in the middle of a duel, and that most Hogwarts students, past and present, have arms like limp seaweed. 

Sansa has spent more time than she’ll admit to building leg muscles like an ox, and like  _ hell  _ she isn’t going to put them to good use.

Bone crunches under the solid sole of her sturdy boot, and she brings her knee up to meet a rapidly descending chin, more pleased than she’d like by the spurt of blood through the mask, by the wet crunch of broken bone and bitten tongue.

She moves on then, fairly confident that she’s won this round, and hardly has time to lift her head before she has to Stun or be killed.

 

_ Before _

 

“You should come to Hogsmeade with me,” Joffrey says. It’s late in January, and someone has dyed Sansa’s hair pink, because of course they have - school has taken a turn for the worse, since Arya started in September, because Arya is a popular, Quidditch playing Gryffindor, and having  _ two _ Starks like that come through just proves that she’s a _ freak.  _

Joffrey doesn’t seem to think so, which is nice. She doesn’t really understand why he bothers with her, since he could have his pick of any girl from sixth year down, but she’s glad of it. 

“The next trip is three weeks from tomorrow,” he says, playing with the end of her braid and frowning a little. “I hear Puddifoot’s is nice, for the time of year.”

Madame Puddifoot’s is a place for  _ dates,  _ and surely-

“Wear those earrings with the sapphires,” he tells her, frown gone with a flick of his wand - he’s smiling, and Sansa feels pink from the soles of her feet all the way to the top of her head. “They bring out your eyes.”

He fixed her hair, she notices an hour later, when she’s floated back to the tower from the Library, and he likes her eyes, and he’s bringing her to  _ Madame Puddifoot’s  _ on  _ Valentine’s Day,  _ and Sansa thinks that maybe, it won’t matter that Arya is as cool as Robb was, because Joffrey fancies her!

 

**Now**

 

A hood is pulled away and a mask falls, and Sansa is face to face with an old friend.

“Your grandfather is going to be furious to have this confirmed,” she says, as easy in his company now as she was before the Incident, because she knows for certain now that she’s more than able to tear his face off with her bare hands. “Your poor mother, Joff. Don’t you ever  _ think?” _

Not that Sansa can stand Cersei Lannister, but that isn’t the point - the point is that Joff is even more stupid than she thought, even more cruel and empty, and that’s sad, somehow, because she knows that he might have grown into a better man than this.

“I don’t need to think,” he says, sneering or leering, they’re much the same from him. “I just need to point and curse.”

He tries - something Unforgivable blistering the air between them, but Sansa dives, under the heat of the spell and right into his gut shoulder-first, and while he’s still wheezing she Body-Binds him, and leaves him there on the floor to be stepped over or stepped on - she doesn’t care.

Part of her wants to go back, to kneel down and take the switchblade she knows he keeps tucked into his boot out, open it up and cut deep into his face, mark him and ruin his good looks just like he ruined hers, but she’s above that, and there are two bastards making a run for the doors to the stairwell, and she can’t have that.

But part of her really does want to kneel down beside him, to take a minute and cut him open just to watch him bleed, to see if she gets the same satisfaction from his pain that he did from hers.

 

_ Before _

 

“Joff, I  _ can’t,”  _ Sansa sighs, knocking aside his encroaching hand with her ruler - she has an Astronomy chart due in the morning, and she can’t quite get it right, because she can’t seem to get the dimensions and the perspective right. “Please, tomorrow, or over the weekend - just not  _ now.” _

“I’ve got Quidditch at the weekend,” Joff grumbles, shuffling closer to her parchment on the tabletop. “And you’ve got Charms Club tomorrow night - come  _ on,  _ Sansa, it’s just a walk!”

It hasn’t been  _ just a walk _ since they got back to school after Christmas, she’s noticed, but she doesn’t say anything. It’s easier to just nudge him away and keep him at arm’s length, really.

“Come  _ on,”  _ he whines, throwing himself back across the table like the big over-dramatic ninny he is. He casts an arm over his eyes, presses the other hand to his heart, but makes sure not to conceal his prefect’s badge - that’s  _ always _ on show. Arya said that he even tried to wear it during Quidditch, but Jory Mormont put her foot down and ruled it a hazard. “Just half an hour, down to the lake and back -  _ please, _ Sansa.”

“No, Joffrey!” she snaps back, annoyed now, because he never  _ listens _ . “I’ve got to get this done, and then I want to get started on my Potions essay! I am  _ busy!” _

It’s true, she is, and she’d quite like to pop over to Mum’s office for a minute before lights out, to warn her that Bran’s been having funny dreams again, but if she wastes time with Joff she won’t have time for that, and Bran’s dreams are far more important than Joff’s hurt feelings.

“If I didn’t love you, I’d never put up with you,” Joff fumes, rolling to his feet and gathering his bag off the chair. “Fuck, Stark, there’s no fun in you anymore.”

“Goodnight, Joffrey,” she says as firmly as she can manage, because it makes her uncomfortable when he starts telling her that he loves her - it always precedes a request, or a demand, and he seems to think that she hasn’t realised it yet. 

She’s a lot smarter than he gives her credit for. She always has been, but she’s really starting to realise it now. It’s only taken her five years of school, and two years as Joffrey’s lucky, lucky girlfriend.

She wouldn’t mind being Cley’s girlfriend, a little, and knowing that makes her wonder if she really ought to be Joff’s girlfriend at all anymore. If she’s gotten bored enough of him to fancy someone else, he’s obviously not right for her anymore. She wouldn’t mind asking Mum about that, too, if she can just get this work done in time.

“You’re so ungrateful,” he says, sudden and cold. “I could have any girl in this school, but I chose you. You could at least  _ pretend _ to be thankful, Sansa.”

“I shouldn’t have to be  _ thankful _ that my boyfriend wants to spend time with me,” she grumbles. “It shouldn’t be something to be thankful  _ for,  _ Joffrey.”

 

**Now**

 

Dilys’ portrait is hollering encouragement as Sansa and half a dozen others sprint for the stairwell doors, countering curses and hurling hexes as they skid across the bloodied floor. There’s so much noise, such a  _ variety  _ of noise, that Sansa’s head is spinning, but she ignores the ringing in her ears because this is more important than that. This is more important than anything else she’s ever done, really. 

Someone - she doesn’t know who, can’t tell one voice from another in all the din - lays a spell on the doors, shimmering them steel-silver and adamant. The Dragonborn slide and don’t stop, slamming into the doors with a thud and a wet crunch that makes Sansa smile, all teeth.

They circle around them, and she realises that Willas is just beyond her - there’s blood on the side of his face, in his hair and beard, and she’ll have to check him over when this is done, and maybe kiss it better - and Joy is just beyond him. They can do this. They  _ have  _ to do this. The patients have to be kept safe - there is no other acceptable outcome.

 

_ Before _

 

“I have my first O.W.L. exam in the morning, Joffrey,” Sansa says, leaning out the door of the Ravenclaw Tower and only having come this far because he sent her a  _ Howler _ because she refused to go for a “walk” with him earlier. “I’m going to study a little more, and then I’m going to  _ sleep. _ ”

“I can’t  _ believe  _ you!” he shouts, drawing the attention of the few people in the corridor outside the tower - Shireen is there, with Sarella Martell, and they were talking softly about something until Joff opened his mouth. “I go out of my  _ fucking  _ way-”

“Hey now,” Sarella says, stepping forward with a frown. “Your grandfather might have the office behind the eagle, Joffrey, but that doesn’t give you the right to speak to another student like that. Apologise and leave, and maybe I won’t report you for being out of bed out of hours.”

“Fucking Mudblood scum,” he fumes, rounding on Sarella - Sarella, who is small and elegant and sometimes Alleras, which confuses people who think she needs to pick a side. Joff is neither small nor elegant, and he is very, deeply angry. “Who the  _ fuck-” _

“My father,” Sarella says lightly, “is one of your precious Sacred Twenty-Eight. My mother is of similarly exalted ancestry, in Ethiopia. If you plan on being disgusting, at least also be  _ accurate.” _

Sansa watches Joff open his mouth to fight back, but Sarella’s wand is very suddenly in her hand, and surely even Joff knows better than that.

He does, mercifully. Sansa doesn’t need the stress of her boyfriend dying the night before her first O.W.L., thanks awfully, and she certainly doesn’t need the stress of an investigation into why Oberyn Martell’s daughter murdered Tywin Lannister’s grandson.

“Goodnight, Joff,” she says. “Go to bed.”

“You-”

“Good _ night,  _ Joffrey,” Sansa says, firmer this time, not at all in the mood to be shouted at anymore. “I will speak with you later.  _ Go to bed.” _

 

**Now**

 

“You can’t win this,” Willas says. “You know you can’t. We’ve been here before.”

The smaller of the pair in the masks laughs, high and razored even through the lacquered wood. Something in Sansa’s stomach turns over, like a backwards heartbeat, when Willas takes a step forward and slightly in front of her. 

“Hand yourself in,” he coaxes, voice low and even, without the rough edges that sometimes seep in when his reserve breaks - a rare thing, but delicious. “You can be held here, at least for now - not on Azkaban. Never on Azkaban, if I can stop it.”

“How sweet,” the woman in the mask drawls, something in her voice familiar to Sansa. “You still care after all.”

“Please, Rhaenys,” Willas says, gentle, soft, a dazzling counterpoint to the swelling rage of battle behind them - his wand, his beautiful rosewood wand, is still raised, and over them all his beautiful silver-white Caladrius bird calls her sorrowful song. His eyes are gold in the spell-light, and Sansa wishes he was a million miles away from this.

 

_ Before _

 

“I’ve told you already, Joffrey,” Sansa says, tugging her wrist out of his hand for the fourth time. “I’m not going for one of your bloody walks tonight - I have Transfiguration in the morning, and I am going to study. You are not welcome to sit with me. You are not welcome to send me Howlers. You are not  _ welcome.” _

“You’re my girlfriend,” he snarls, low and rough, the way his voice always gets when he’s close to losing his temper. “ _ Mine,  _ Sansa, do you understand?”

She slams her books down on the table, drawing curious eyes from all around, but right now she doesn’t care. Right now, she just wants to  _ smack _ Joffrey, right in the face, because he’s been absolutely insufferable since Christmas and she hasn’t the patience for him, she really doesn’t.

“I am doing my exams,” she says, through tightly gritted teeth. “I am  _ not _ free to walk around the lake and have you try to cop a feel when I let you kiss me. I am  _ not _ in the right frame of mind to find your persistence to the point of  _ Howlers _ charming or funny. I am  _ not _ in any mood for you, Joffrey, so  _ go away.” _

He stares at her, wide-eyed, and then scowls. His scowl is filthy ugly, removing any trace of good looks, and she wants to smack it right off his face. She does!

“How  _ dare _ you,” he hisses. He’s taller than her, she realises, and his arms - revealed as they are by the tight sleeves of his shirt - are thick with muscle. Very thick. Oh, Merlin’s pants, what has she done? Isn’t this why she’s always played nice? Isn’t this why-

The backhand takes her by surprise - the strength behind it doesn’t, really, but the ferocity does, as does the searing pain of her cracking cheekbone.

“If you  _ ever _ speak to me like that again,” he says, looming over her, “this is only a taster of what I’ll do in return. Understood?”

His head disappears, and Sansa cups her hand over her aching cheek as Joffrey is dragged backwards by his hair, stumbling over his feet and the benches.

Arya throws him down onto the Gryffindor table, hard, and then climbs up on the bench to stand over him with her wand to his throat.

“If you ever touch my sister again,” she says, twelve years and barely five foot of unbridled rage right now, “I’ll blast your ugly head right off.  _ Understood?” _

Arya catches Sansa by the elbow the moment she’s jumped away from Joffrey, and frog-marches her to the hospital wing. Mum appears, and doesn’t believe a word of Sansa’s story about falling against a banister, but she doesn’t say anything, and Sansa knows it’ll go no further. No student wants to be known as a tell-tale.

 

**Now**

 

Rhaenys Targaryen’s eyes are black and luminous, and she is painfully beautiful. Sansa is a little jealous, truth be told, of those heavy black curls, those long black eyelashes, that skin like sunset on gold. 

Her wand is elder, Sansa thinks, and her hand is shaking as she holds it toward Willas.

“I don’t want to hurt you, Willas,” Rhaenys says, her voice as much a purr as Willas’ and more again - Willas is tense beside Sansa, his jaw locked and sweat beading through the blood on his forehead. “Never again. I promised, didn’t I?”

“We can get you out, Rhae,” he says. “I swear it, I’ll do everything I can, and everything  _ Dad _ can. Please, Rhaenys. Not this. Not after everything she’s suffered. Don’t make her go back.”

“I promised to never hurt  _ you _ again,” Rhaenys says, hand still trembling even as she turns her wand on Sansa. “But I never promised not to hurt your new toys, did I?”

Willas moves quickly - spellwork, a physical attack, Sansa can’t be sure - but not quickly enough. He’s hardly moved a muscle before Rhaenys’ wand flicks, and the pain in Sansa’s bones burns so hot that that elder wand must have a dragon heartstring core.

Nothing exists, outside of the pain. Not now.

 

_ Before _

 

The night after her last exam - her History of Magic exam - Sansa is walking back to the Tower, alone, after dinner.

“We’re going for a walk,” Joffrey says. “I’ve got something to show you.”

He shows her red on silver - her blood on his switchblade.

That night, sitting on a bed in the hospital wing while Madam Mordane does her best to stitch Sansa’s curse-cut face back together, makes a decision for Sansa.

“I’m going to be a Healer,” she tells Mum, when Madam Mordane is finished. “So I can help people who’ve been as stupid as me.”

Mum doesn’t say anything to that, just holds her close, and Sansa almost cries. 

Almost. It hurts far too much to cry.

 

**Now**

 

The pain stops, for a second, and through tears Sansa can see a flash of blinding red from Willas’ wand.

It misses, though, and the pain returns - but he is beside her now, screaming raw and bloody and even louder than her, and that is somehow a comfort.


	2. Splintering

**Now**

 

It-

_ Hurts _ isn’t enough.  _ Aches _ isn’t enough.

It changes the whole world. Sansa can still see, through her tears, when her eyes squint open - her glasses are gone, but she can make out enough to know that yes, that is Willas, howling the world to a halt beside her. Yes, that is Rhaenys Targaryen’s beautiful face above them, twisted with fury and jealousy. 

Yes, that is Joffrey, laughing. 

 

_ Before _

 

“This is quite the workload,” Professor Baratheon says, mild and stern as only he can be. Mum insists that he’s a nice man, really, and Sansa supposes he must be, to have fathered a daughter as lovely as Shireen, but mostly he’s austere and intimidating. He’s not a million miles away from Professor Lannister, really, except there isn’t that edge of barely-leashed cruelty that Sansa sometimes catches in Professor Lannister’s eyes, when he happens upon someone being bullied.

“I’m able for it,” Sansa assures him, and he nods once. She likes that about him - he’s taught her for five years, been her head of house for the same, and he knows her capabilities. Sansa is  _ smart. _ She knows it, her teachers know it - now it’s time to let the world know it. “And I’m able for the extra, sir.”

The  _ extra _ is a special course that she’ll be doing via owl, an O.W.L. standard course in Healing - it’s just the basics, but it’ll give her an edge, going into St. Mungo’s, and Sansa wants every edge she can get. 

Mum and Dad think she’s going too far - she can get into St. Mungo’s with Transfiguration, Charms, Potions, Defence Against The Dark Arts, Herbology, and Care of Magical Creatures, especially with the grades she knows she’s going to get - but she almost feels as if she isn’t going far enough.

Sansa made a stupid mistake, and she’s going to carry proof of that on her face for the rest of her life. She’s going to make sure that there’s someone there for the next girl who makes the same mistake, and all the girls after her.

Joffrey is forbidden from coming within ten yards of her, and Sansa hates that she’s comforted by the restrictions. She wants to be fierce and brave and strong, like Arya, or Mum, but she feels very weak and very stupid every time she sees Joffrey laughing across the Great Hall.

“I don’t doubt it,” Professor Baratheon says, and Sansa wonders how he can possibly be Joffrey’s uncle, how Shireen can possibly be Joffrey’s cousin. Do people wonder the same about her and Jon, sometimes? “I do wonder at your motivation for doing this, though.”

Sansa can’t help but scowl, but he won’t mind - Stannis Baratheon prefers honest grumpiness to false cheer, every Ravenclaw knows that all too well, 

“It has nothing to do with Joffrey,” she says, hoping he won’t mind this lie. “It’s about me, and about being prepared for the career I wish to pursue. I want to be the best Healer I am capable of being, Professor - and this is a way to help me along the way to that goal.”

Ravenclaws are very goal-oriented, everyone knows that. Sansa’s just fudging it a bit as to what her goal actually  _ is. _

Sometimes, her goal is to break every bone in Joffrey’s good-looking face with her bare knuckles, and she never acknowledges that one. She’s above that. 

“Well then,” Professor Baratheon says, with a nod and a frown that might be a smile, on that stern face, “I’m happy to sign off on your taking this course.”

And he signs the permission slip right there in front of her, and hands it to her with another of those maybe-smile frowns. It feels better than anything else has, since Joffrey’s knife glanced off her eye and her vision went half-black.

 

**Now**

 

She tastes blood in the middle of it all - bit her tongue, screamed her throat raw, she isn’t sure. The taste is salty more than anything else, overwhelming on top of her tears, and she spat, maybe, to be rid of it.

She screamed some more, after spitting, and coughed a little - she was sure she coughed, and there was hot-wet on her cheek that was probably blood. 

Is this what madness feels like? Creaking bones and crackling thoughts snapping behind her good eye and her bad, her legs and arms not her own to control, and her  _ voice,  _ screaming and screaming and then howling, as if the wolf or werewolf or the legend of her family’s origin in her blood was trying to come out, if only to stop the eternity in this place.

Willas bellows, as if some new pain has hit him, and she hears a crunch that can only be his false leg - no bone could crack so loud, so echoing. 

Again, Joffrey laughs. Rhaenys Targaryen’s face is still beautiful, and raging.

 

_ Before _

 

“The glasses suit you, Stark.”

Joffrey is already sitting on the corner of her table by the time she lifts her head, and he’s smiling down at her as if nothing has changed.

Everything has changed. Sansa feels as if she’s all new and unknown, a river yet unplotted after changing its course.

Cley and Jeyne are sitting across from her - Joffrey has his back to them, so he can’t see the cold murder waiting in Jeyne’s huge, soft eyes, or the plan forming as easily as a ticking clock in Cley’s head. Sansa can see them, but she can also feel the ghost of that cursed switchblade, with its dragonbone handle, cutting her skin and her flesh and leaving her with what, mercifully, cannot be read as a  _ J _ from her hairline to just below her right ear.

She’s blind in her right eye now, or may as well be - she can use that to excuse not seeing Jeyne and Cley’s frantic hands as she reaches for her wand.

“If you aren’t gone by the time I count to five,” she says, wand raising all on its own - or at least, that’s how it feels. “I will hex you so thoroughly that your unfortunate great-grandchildren will feel it on their deathbeds.”

“Come on now, Stark-”

“One.”

His smile falters, falls into a frown, and turns sour.

“Just because your bitch of a mother threw a tantrum and my grandfather indulged her doesn’t mean I’m actually going to stay away. You know I would never abandon-”

“Two.”

“Be reasonable, Sansa,” he says, standing up now, and her wand follows him. “I-”

“Three.”

“Oh, you’re being absurd,” he huffs, and raises a hand toward her.

He hits the bookcase behind him so hard that it follows him to the floor, when she Stuns him. Sansa’s hands are shaking so badly that Cley has to levitate the shelves and books off Joffrey, while Jeyne presses Sansa’s head down between her knees to try and stave off the panic attack.

 

**Now**

 

Her wand, somehow, is still in her hand.

It’s a comfort - a better comfort even than Willas’ presence on the floor beside her, because his screams have devolved into sobs that make her chest ache - and a hope, too, because if she has her wand…

Well. Sansa is better at defensive charmwork than anyone else in Britain, except maybe Mum, isn’t she?

The pain doubles down - oh, Morgana, she can feel her lungs creaking with every hollowing, howling breath - and she forgets about charmwork for a minute.

She doesn’t forget her wand, though.

 

_ Before _

 

“Right,” Arya says. “Listen, you need to toughen up.”

“Excuse  _ me?” _ Sansa manages, stunned by Arya’s… Arya-ness. Of course Arya thinks  _ toughening up _ is the solution to Sansa’s problem. 

Joffrey hasn’t come near her since the incident in September, in the Library - no one has, really. The knowledge that she’s got a Stunner strong enough to render him unconscious for three days seems to have alarmed an awful lot of people, not least Mum. 

Joff is sitting just across the way, glaring at Arya’s back - he has a black eye, which probably means that he was badmouthing Sansa at Quidditch training again. Arya has no patience whatsoever for him, when he’s in a mood like that, and they wouldn’t like one another even without what he did to Sansa - he thinks it’s an outrage that a third year has been made Seeker, rather than him, the seventh year, who isn’t even captain. Professor Mormont thought better of that - Bryn Umber is excellent, and big enough to smash Joff right out of the air with a well-placed Bludger. 

“What I mean,” Arya says, “is that you’re not always going to have your wand at hand - so you need to learn how to knee a bloke in the bollocks without letting him catch hold of you.”

“Unlike you,” Sansa says, “I  _ do _ always have my wand at hand-”

“Then how come you’ve got Twathead Baratheon’s initials carved into your face?” Arya points out. “Come on, Sansa - it might even be fun!”

 

**Now**

 

“Think of it like this,” Joffrey says, crouched right down beside her, that  _ fucking _ knife loose and open in his hand. “It was always going to be me, wasn’t it?”

She jabs her wand as hard as she can upwards, into the soft spot right behind his bits and bobs, and he screams. 

Oh, does he  _ scream. _

 

_ Before _

 

“They’re recruiting,” Cley says, under his breath, so only Sansa and Jeyne can hear. “Didn’t you know? Half of Slytherin has been Scaled, and they’re saying that a good lot of the Gryffindors have been sucked in, too.”

“I suspect there’s one or two of our lot have fallen down as well,” Jeyne says, fraying at her knitting as she only does when she’s remembering bad days. “Merlin’s pants, Sansa, do you really think the Targaryens could be recruiting right under Professor Lannister and your mum’s noses?”

Sansa’s been watching Joff the whole time, watching the way he itches at his right arm - his wand arm - and looks even more smug than usual.

“I believe it,” she says. “I’ll believe just about anything about the Targaryens, truth be told.”

 

**Now**

 

The pain snaps away to nothing, when Joffrey falls back - he knocks the Dragonborn around him like skittles, and Sansa sobs her way back to something that’s hopefully sanity as Arwyn Oakheart and Durran Bar Emmon Body-Bind the Dragonborn still free.

There’s blood, on the pale, polished tiles. Sansa can see it when she curls onto her side, around the pain, around her wand. It’s haunting her bones, not as absent as she’d believed, in that first moment of relief, and she wonders if it’s because Rhaenys Targaryen is rigid and leaning against the wall, her shining eyes focused murder-bright on Sansa’s face.

Willas’ hand twitches toward her - she can’t uncurl enough to reach for him, but she wants to. She will, as soon as she stops aching and shaking.

 

_ Before _

 

“Some of you may have noticed a great decrease in the number of students at our tables,” Professor Lannister intones, the first day back after Christmas. “Some are half-blood or Muggleborn students, removed for their own safety by their parents, sometimes on our advice. Others are children of parents who have been injured or killed in the encroaching war.”

“Not one to mince his words,” Cley murmurs, and Sansa bites her lip - to hold in a laugh or to keep from crying, she isn’t sure, because Jeyne is a half-blood and she didn’t come back to school.

“Some, however,” he says, “are the children of those sworn to Aerys Targaryen.”

He pauses - for dramatic effect, to let his words sink in, to give his next words room to breath - and then continues.

“Some,” he says, “are sworn themselves to Aerys Targaryen.”

How many people in this hall have met the man who calls himself the Dragonlord, Sansa wonders? How many people have - or had - grandparents who were Aerys’ friends at school, how many have parents or older siblings who were friends with Aerys’ sons?

Sansa was friends with Aerys’ daughter, kind of. Daenerys was in Charms Club, and now she’s in the Auror’s office, training under Cersei Lannister. They say Cersei only takes the best, and that she’s mad as a bag of cats, but by all reports Daenerys is more than capable of keeping up with her.

The uproar in the hall makes her flinch - Cley’s hand is firm on her wrist, and it helps, but she’s terrified. She is. Because Sansa can see Joff across the hall, cool as a cucumber, and he’s  _ still here. _

She knows that there’s a pattern of red-black scales etched into the skin of his right forearm. She doesn’t need to see it to know. Joffrey becoming Dragonborn is such a natural progression of everything she knows about him that she can’t believe she wasted two whole years of her life as his girlfriend.

“With that in mind,” Professor Lannister says, raising his voice only barely, but it’s enough - no one dares to speak over him, not ever. “I hope to see increased unity among those of you who remain with us - I will not tolerate interhouse fighting, except on the Quidditch pitch.”

 

**Now**

 

She tries to stand.

Willas doesn’t even try - instead, he’s clawing at his trouser leg, over the buckles of his leg-brace. 

Does the Cruciatus Curse make curse-scars hurt? Sansa can’t feel her face at all - she thinks her glasses might have smashed, that she might have hit her head on the floor and that’s why she’s numb from temple to chin - so she doesn’t know. Looking at Willas, though, it must.

“Let me,” she says, or tries to say, but all she can taste is blood and there are no words left in her throat. Her fingers won’t come loose from around her wand, either, so she’s absolutely useless to him.

His beautiful Caladrius bird floats down from above, in the stillness after battle, cooing and crooning mournfully as she settles under his chin. Her song makes the ringing in Sansa’s ears lessen a little, and Willas looks to be breathing easier for her presence.

“Clíodhna,” he manages, and Sansa startles at the sound of his voice - it’s a ruin, ripped apart and stitched carelessly back together. The music and the gentleness are gone, the fullness all emptied out. “My Clíodhna.”

His healing bird named for a healing goddess. Clíodhna usually rides his shoulder as they go on their rounds, and when she hops up to perch there as if nothing is amiss, Willas begins to cry.

Sansa joins him, just as Joy rolls her onto her back - she doesn’t even know if they stopped the Dragonborn from breaching the staircase, and right now, it hurts too much for her to even care.

 

_ Before _

 

“We have to become something more than just a Healer and an Unspeakable,” Cley says, legs crossed at the ankle and stretched out toward the water. Sansa’s taller than him by a good four inches now, but it doesn’t worry him in the slightest. “We only have a year left to make the most of your mum and Professor Lannister and Mad Maege - we’ve got to get everything we can out of them.”

She agrees - of course she agrees, that’s why she’s been going out to the Quidditch pitch three nights a week with Arya to beat the living shit out of one another and whatever of Arya’s friends she can scrounge up, because between Jeyne’s absence and Joff’s looming presence, Sansa doesn’t have many friends besides Cley, who can talk his way out of pretty much anything. 

They have to be ready to fight this. There’s a war going on, even if no one wants them to know about it, and they have to be  _ ready _ .

“We have to be careful, though,” Sansa says. “Otherwise we’ll forget that there’s life after the war, and we won’t be able for it when it comes.”

Cley grins, the setting sun casting his pale teeth and dark eyes in shades of red and black - an irony, a Targaryen banner on his face. 

“Confident of victory,” he says, rolling over and up to his feet. “Come on then, let’s get some preemptive celebration in.”

She takes his outstretched hand, lets him pull her to her feet, and they walk back into the castle, for the end of year feast - their next-to-last, and somehow the scariest thing Sansa has ever faced.

 

**Now**

 

Oblivion begins to seep in at the edges as Healer Oakheart cradles Sansa’s face in her long, careworn fingers.

“You brave, brave girl,” she says, warmth teasing darkness from Sansa’s mind into being. The darkness feels like it might be comforting, and Sansa wants to sink into it and never come out. “You survived so long in there, Miss Stark. So very, very long.”

It felt like a clutch of heartbeats, from where Sansa was sitting, but she can’t find her tongue to disagree. 

Somewhere, probably, she’s very proud of herself for remaining sane, under the Cruciatus. Mostly, she just wants to spend the rest of her life in a softly lit room, with blankets and maybe Cley for company, because that sounds like it might not  _ hurt. _

“Let’s get her upstairs,” Healer Oakheart says, her warm hands disappearing. “Private rooms for all the injured staff - we’ll need to wait for the Aurors to decide about the  _ other _ patients.”

The private rooms are usually kept aside for the dying, and Sansa’s heart seizes in her chest - has she gone mad, and doesn’t realise that she’s dying? Is that what it is?

Someone coughs, and she looks, and it’s Willas. 

Somehow, he smiles. She knows she can’t be dying if he’s smiling like that, with blood on his teeth and in his hair, Clíodhna perched mournfully on his heaving chest.

“Fourth floor for them both, my loves,” Healer Oakheart calls over their heads. “The private rooms by my office, thank you.”

Willas’ smile turns, and Sansa feels panic coiling again - fourth floor is Spell Damage, and Arwyn Oakheart’s office is right across from the Janus Thickey Ward.

No one who goes into Janus Thickey comes out. Sansa doesn’t know about the private rooms across the hall from the ward, but it’s only a hop, skip, and a jump from one to the other.

She tries to argue, tries to say  _ no, anywhere but Thickey,  _ but she still can’t find her tongue.

Willas’ hand reaches for hers, across the gap between their stretchers, and she just about manages to brush her smallest finger against his for two painful breaths, and then he’s gone.


	3. Shards

"I am  _going_ to see my son!" the Minister bellowed, and Cat had to catch Ned by the elbow to stop him. Mace Tyrell wasn't the only one in the hospital who had a critically ill child, but Cat knew better than just about anyone outside the Tyrell family how close Mace and Alerie had already come to losing their eldest boy, and she couldn't blame him for his panic. 

Ned was beside himself too, of course, because it always seemed to be Sansa. Sansa who couldn't settle at Hogwarts, Sansa who had so few friends, Sansa who had all that terrible trouble with the Baratheon boy, and now Sansa who might well have been dying, or mad.

"Doran," Ned called, marching down the hall, his limp more pronounced now after wading through the throngs at the hospital doors. "Doran, please-"

"She's with the healers, Ned," Doran Martell said, exhausted, wan in his wheelchair. "I cannot tell you more, not now. You may as well make yourself comfortable."

Ned pulled her close then, for her comfort or his own, and Cat held on tight. 

Mace and Alerie Tyrell were holding on to one another at the far end of the corridor, and Cat had half a mind to go to them, to offer what little comfort she had to give - but what point was there? They might have nearly lost Sansa before, but they'd never had reason to fear for her  _mind_ before. Her comfort would be meaningless to the Tyrells.

It was going to be a long night.

 

* * *

 

 

Robb threw open his window when Arya wouldn't stop hammering on the old, bubbled glass. She was still wearing her training robes, knee pads dripping wet from the descending fog, and looked frozen but flushed from wind and exertion.

"What the hell is going on?" he demanded, motioning for her to come. Arya often came in by the window, reluctant to travel except by broom, and Robb couldn't always stamp his jealousy down properly - he hadn't been able to fly long-distance since that curse had rebounded into his chest and left his lungs only half working. The healers had done all they could, and Sansa had tried a few of what she called "spells who want to take their O.W.L.s," but the air above ground level was just that little bit too thin for him to manage for very long.

"I can't come in," Arya said, "and you need to grab that Cleansweep and a cloak and get out here after me - we haven't got any time to waste."

"Why in the world do I need to fly somewhere with you?" he asked, confused now - Arya, under her flight goggles, looked as if she'd been crying. Arya  _never_ cried. "What's going on?"

"It's Sansa," Bran said, appearing in the modified broom Dad had commissioned for him - two brooms, really, which folded and unfolded as needed, built into the bottom of a functional but not very comfortable wheelchair. "Mum was called from school, and Dad sent for Rickon and me. She's in Saint Mungo's. Not for work."

Bran's face was pale-and-pink, just like Arya's, but he also looked sick with guilt. He always looked sick with guilt, lately - what use was clairvoyance if, by the time he interpreted his visions, he was always too late?

"Rickon's with you?" 

"So's Jon," Arya said. "And Brandon and Lya and Ben. They've gone on ahead - we've catching up to do, so hurry up."

Robb grabbed his cloak, stomped into his boots, and drank down the little silver-blue potion Sansa had given him last time they'd had lunch, and hoped it worked.

"Come on, then," he said, jumping out the window broom-first. "Any idea what's wrong with her?"

 

* * *

 

 

Brandon, as always, ignored Cat as soon as he could get Ned away from her, but Lya wrapped her arms tight around Cat's waist and held on for dear life - just for a moment, and then she stepped away so Rickon could have a turn.

"There was an attack on the hospital," Ned said, leaning hard against Brandon and looking hollowed out already. "Sansa was- one of Aerys' creatures-"

"Rhaenys Targaryen used the Cruciatus Curse on Sansa," Cat said, running her hands through Rickon's untidy hair. "She's up on the fourth floor. There's talk she might be put in Janus Thickey."

Rickon, mercifully, doesn't seem to understand just what that means, but the others do - Brandon looks repulsed, until he corrects it to concern, but Lya and Ben both make the same horrible little noises that Cat and Ned made when they were told just how bad Sansa's situation might be.

The other three come in before Cat can think too hard about it, Robb herding Arya ahead of him and pushing Bran's chair, and she cannot even begin to imagine how terrifying this must be for them.

 

* * *

 

 

Sansa didn't wake.

It had been two days, and she was still in the sort of sleep that usually needed magical assistance - deep, even, and peaceful.

"Mum," Robb said, coming to stand behind Mum's chair, hands on her shoulders. He looked massive in the shadows, and would've looked fierce even without the curse-scars curling up his neck. "Come on - get a cup of tea. We'll stay with her."

Mum didn't even move, though, didn't even react. She just stayed very still, and held on tight to Sansa's hand.

Arya put a cup of tea down on the little locker by the bed, and stepped away before anyone could say anything. She'd used the Sleekeazy's Dry-Wash Wonder on Mum's hair earlier, and Dad had given out to her for making it easier for Mum to stay where she was, but Arya kind of understood. When fucking Baratheon had cut Sansa's face, Arya hadn't moved from her bedside even once, except to use the loo, and Sansa had been awake and aware, more or less.

Now, though, she was very still, and very quiet, and only obviously alive because they could see that she was breathing. 

Arya had seen Sansa fight off bullies, housemates who'd made her life hell because they didn't think she  _belonged_ in lofty Ravenclaw, every person who'd ever looked even slightly sideways at Bran, a multitude of Lannister cousins who blamed her for having damaged Baratheon's chances of a cushy job in the Ministry, the idiots who thought that because she was pretty she wasn't smart enough to be a Healer, and Baratheon himself. She didn't have a single doubt that Sansa would wake up and be totally herself after this.

Everyone else did doubt, though, except for Mum. Arya didn't know if that was because they didn't know Sansa, or because they were losing hope because of this bloody war. Either way, it didn't matter - what mattered was that having them all crowding around her wasn't doing Sansa any good, and Arya wasn't going to be around for much longer to keep their spirits up. She had a match tomorrow, and it was only her second, so she couldn't afford to miss it, not if she wanted to keep her place and shut up the naysayers who thought she was only on the team because of her name.

"Right," she said, nudging Robb to sit down on the other side of the bed, beside Dad, and pulling away the chair he'd been sitting in beside Mum so Bran could squeeze in there, and putting that chair beside Robb so Rickon had somewhere to sit. "I'm going to get food, and while I'm gone, I don't want any bickering, and I don't want any of you lot badgering Mum to get up. She'll get up when she needs to get up, and until then, she's doing Sansa more good than any of you are."

"Excuse  _me-"_ Dad tried, but Arya was having none of it.

"I'll be gone tonight," she said, "and I won't be back until tomorrow night, and I want to be sure that nobody gets any  _ideas_ about forcibly removing Mum from Sansa's bedside, because she'll out-hex any of you. So I'm going to get food, and we'll use that as a test run, alright?"

Dad was frowning, but he was too tired and worried to fight. Bran had probably guessed just why she was so on edge, and Robb looked like he agreed, at least that they'd probably start a fight.

Rickon was pouting, though, so she wasn't banking on them staying all that quiet.

Cley Cerwyn and Lar Hornwood were sitting in the hall outside, and a plain woman with kind eyes who Arya almost recognised, wearing Muggle trousers under a witch's cloak.

"How is she?" Cley asked, tugging the woman - Merlin's pants, it was Jeyne Poole! - to her feet with him. "Has she woken up yet?"

"Not yet," Arya said. "I'm going to get food now, but I'll let you know as soon as anything changes. I did promise, Cley."

"We're just worried," Lar said, arms folded and face turned down. "She bounced back from everything else she's been hit with, but this is... This isn't like her."

"I know that," Arya said, annoyed that Lar, who'd only been friends with Sansa since they were in seventh year at Hogwarts, seemed to consider himself some sort of  _authority_ on her sister. "I know her better than just about anyone - she's going to be fine. It's just taking a little longer than we thought it would."

From what Arya knew of the Targaryens, even of the  _good_ Targaryens, that wasn't all that surprising. They were capable of acts of Dark magic that seemed impossible to normal minds, and their talent with the Unforgivable Curses was infamous. 

She couldn't see why Rhaenys Targaryen might have expended so much bloody effort on Sansa, of all people, but that was a question for another time. Right now, all that mattered was that Sansa got better, and Arya had every faith that she would.

"Can we see her?" Jeyne bloody Poole asked, her hands shaking on her cloak. "Please?"

"It's family only for now," Arya said, feeling sorrier for Jeyne, who hadn't seen Sansa since her parents pulled her out of Hogwarts, than she did for Cley or Lar. "She will want to see you when she wakes up, though, so please stay - you can stay in mine, if you need somewhere to sleep, or I'm sure Robb wouldn't mind you using his, either. I'll have him come out to you as soon as I get back."

Jeyne smiled, a tremulous little thing, and nodded. Arya had a horrible feeling it would take an awful lot for Jeyne to feel even slightly safe among wizards again.

 

* * *

 

 

Cley and Lar and Jeyne were gone by the time Arya arrived back, but she could hear arguing from Sansa's room from the end of the corridor.

Lysa was inside, standing between Dad and the bed, her arm tied up against her chest in a sling, and she was completely red in the face - which meant she was in a high temper.

"I swear, Ned Stark, if you try to remove my sister from her daughter's bedside one more time, I'll hex you into the bloody Channel," Lysa hissed, wand out and pointed squarely at Dad's throat. "Cat is helping, you great twit - she's talking to Sansa, drawing her back! All you've done is sigh and huff and be a big pessimistic wet blanket pissing all over her hope for recovery, and I won't  _have_ it!"

"You've no right to come in here and tell me how to care for my children," Dad fumed, going hard-faced as he so rarely did. "Now get out, Lysa, surely you have other things you could be doing-"

"I'm visibly injured from the attack,  _Ned,"_ she said. "I've been taken off active duty until the blasted Skele-Gro does its work, and until then there are only two patients I'm allowed to even look in on, so you can shove it up your-"

"Enough," Mum said, quietly but very, very firmly. "If you want to keep fighting, get out of this room. Otherwise, sit down, drink your tea, and eat whatever Arya's brought." 

There was an awkward quiet as Arya handed out the food - burgers for the boys, a massive sandwich for Dad, fish and chips for Mum, the spare bag of chips for Lysa, and a veggie burger for Arya. Muggle food, the sort Robb had started recommending after he'd gone out with that Muggleborn girl just after he left school, and the handiest option, once she'd transfigured a couple of Galleons into Muggle money.

Everyone sat down, unable to talk while stuffing their faces, and Bran handed out bottles of pumpkin juice he'd produced from some unknown compartment in his chair. By the time they were done, and the rubbish all gathered up neatly in the big paper bag, everyone had calmed down quite a bit.

"Who's the other patient you're allowed look in on?" Robb asked, rubbing his chest - a sure sign his own spell-damage was acting up - and leaning forward. 

Lysa blinked at him a time or two, and then smiled.

"I'm surprised you can't guess, since you've been seeing his sister on and off for the past six months," Lysa she said, still smiling, but suddenly looking her age, which she never usually did. "Poor Willas, of course - Willas Tyrell. He's in almost as bad a state as Sansa. He woke up this morning, of course, but we've had to sedate the poor lamb, which isn't surprising, all things considered."

Arya didn't know what exactly Lysa meant by that, but Mum obviously did because her mouth had gone thin and sad. Robb looked a little less confused than Arya felt, and Rickon was nodding off, but Bran looked as if the pieces were falling into place - which meant he'd Seen something about all this mess.

"That's Marg's eldest brother, isn't it?" Robb hazarded. "I only really know Loras - what happened him?"

"Rhaenys Targaryen cursed him almost as brutally as she did Sansa," Mum said, surprising them all. "Because she's as mad and possessive as her bloody grandfather."

 


	4. Crushing

**Now**

 

Sansa’s scars have split, just as his own have - but he doesn’t care about his own, except to want his prosthesis gone, not when Sansa is bloodied and hurt and it’s all his fault.

She looks so desperately young, with the ruins of her glasses half-hanging on still, her face hidden by hair and blood and pain. He wonders how he ever allowed it to come to this, to a point where his regard for Sansa is so obvious that even Rhaenys could see it.

His heart is still mostly in tatters, thanks to Rhaenys, but it hurts to see her like this - to see the fury and the cruelty that he blinded himself to, for so long-

“I’ve sent word to your lady mother,” Arwyn says to him, low and gentle. “She and Fathead will be here as soon as I give them the all-clear to Apparate in.”

Arwyn is his godmother, Mum’s best friend since they were girls, and he wishes he had the strength to reach up and hug her - because he might be twenty-seven years old, but all he wants is his mother.

She was the only one who could get through to him when last Rhaenys hurt him, after all.

 

_Before_

 

Rhaenys is smiling when he glances up, and Willas blushes. He hates blushing, but he does it every time Rhaenys smiles at him like that.

The potion in her cauldron is throwing up a glorious sunrise gold against her cheeks, and she looks so beautiful that Willas almost adds eye of newt instead of eye of toad to his own potion. He still can’t quite believe that _Rhaenys_ chose _him._

“If you’re quite finished _canoodling,_ Tyrell,” Professor Baelish says, sour because everyone knows he tried it on with Professor Stark _again_ , after the Halloween feast, and she shot him down _again._ “It’s time for you all to deliver your samples - be quick about it, thank you.”

Willas’ cheeks flare hot again, but he doesn’t care - Rhaenys is smiling at him. At _him!_

He’s known her all his life, kind of - there’s enough of a rivalry between his family and her mother’s that they always just _happen_ to bump into one another, so they can bicker loudly and publicly - but it’s only the past little while that he’s really gotten to know her, since they chose all the same subjects for their N.E.W.T.s. Willas doesn’t know why Rhaenys is doing precisely the same subjects as him - she could have done anything at all she wanted, since she’s just going into her father’s business, whatever that is, but Willas has a very specific career path in mind, which is why-

“Outstanding quality, Tyrell,” Professor Baelish says, grudging with his praise as he always is to those he cannot wring dry. “As always.”

Willas can’t help but beam - his potion-making has always been absolutely superfluous, much to Granny’s chagrin. She’s always been disappointed that he showed such an aptitude for a subject other than hers, even if she _was_ thrilled that yes, contrary to what everyone else said, he _had_ sorted Slytherin.

Not that he  _doesn't_ have an aptitude for Herbology - school is easy, it truly is, and Willas has no doubt whatsoever that he'll be studying and working in Saint Mungo's after his N.E.W.T.s.

"Miss Targaryen," Professor Baelish says, sidling along their bench in that insinuating way of his. "Near perfect, but not quite - more attention to detail next time, and less to Tyrell's pretty face?"

"You're far too kind, Professor," Willas says without thinking, and then flushes crimson. That's something Garlan or Loras would say, not him, but Rhaenys is smiling so he presses on. "I've been called handsome, but never  _pretty."_

Baelish's face sours, like the curdled remains of the potion clinging to the inside of Amarys' cauldron, and folds inward when giggles echo to the dungeon ceiling. 

"Get out," he snaps, "or I'll lower your grade."

Willas runs then, his bag hanging open with his books hanging out, and laughs out loud when Rhaenys darts after him and links her hand through his.

 

**Now**

 

He's been here before - it was a blast of the Cruciatus that broke him free of the Imperius, after all - but that does not lessen the pain at all. 

Clíodhna helps more than any of the draughts or charms they try to steal the lingering aches and creaks of his bones. A Caladrius bird is a rare treasure indeed, drawn only to Healers who are true to their oaths and promises, and Willas is fully aware of how blessed he is to have her - but he wishes that she would go to Sansa, or to the wards where the other injured lie. She stays with him, though, singing away his pain and heartache, easing the desperate whirlwind in his mind.

Seeing Rhaenys, after such a long time... It was so much harder than he'd expected. He'd loved her so fiercely, for so long, and their split had been so terrible and violent that he hadn't even been able to bear hearing her name for months afterwards.

Her voice still makes the hair on the back of his neck stand on end, but for very different reasons now than before.

"Feeling better?" Dad asks, handing him a huge cup of tea - honey, no sugar, just as he likes it - and settling into the chair by the bed. "You look better. Where's your bird?"

Willas holds out his empty hand, fingers crooked, and Clíodhna takes her perch with a chirp. Dad rolls his eyes, but then he has a copy of today's Prophet in his hand and there's no need for further discussion.

That's one of the things Willas loves best about his father - for all his bombast and boom, Dad is an absolute champion at sitting quietly with a cup of tea and the paper. Only Garlan is his equal.

Or Sansa.

His leg is throbbing - curse-scars have a nasty tendency to rupture under the Cruciatus, and his own is no different. The scar tissue had worn almost smooth after years on his false leg, and it's going to be agonising to accustom himself to wearing it again. 

He wonders - have they had to stitch Sansa's scars? She'll hate it if they have, because stitches itch, and they'll inevitably leave more marks around her eye. 

"I want to see her, Dad," he says quietly. "Not- not Rhaenys. Sansa."

Dad sighs, folds his newspaper, and puts down his tea. Then he takes Willas' tea, puts that down, and takes Willas' hand. His signet ring is heavy, and Willas wonders where his own is gone - he was wearing it before the attack, but it's been missing since. 

Looking at his hands, scabbed and bandaged, he wonders if he might have to wear his ring on a chain around his neck. It wouldn't be practical for work, but he won't be able to work for weeks, not with his leg, not with his mind curling in on itself every time he stops concentrating-

"Son," Dad says, "why did Rhaenys single out the Stark girl?"

Willas can feel the ugly blush spreading up his neck, but knows there's no point in denying it. His affection for Sansa has already almost cost her her life, and may yet cost her her beautiful mind. He owes her that honesty - will owe her family that honesty - but wishes there hadn't been such a need for secrecy before now.

"Rhaenys knows me better than anyone," he admits, "and she- she saw that I have-"

It is so hard to explain himself. He was never good with words, not important ones, and he feels as if he's going to be sick, trying to find  _these_ words, especially since he hasn't even had a chance to find them for Sansa yet.

"Oh, you poor boy," Dad says, shaking his head, and his pity is disgusting - Willas has always hated being pitied, more so since the whole mess with Rhaenys. "You've hardly recovered from what that bitch did to you, Willas-"

"It's been years, Dad," Willas says, because it _has._ It's been just over three years now, and Willas has done all the right things - he's followed the Healers' orders, he's spoken to the special Healer Aunt Arwyn recommended when he stopped sleeping and eating, he's done  _right._ He's  _better_. "It's been long enough that I'm not scared anymore."

That's true, too. When first he met Sansa, when first he came to Saint Mungo's to teach, he had been a disaster - unable to bear touching or being touched except by a patient, barely able to hold his temper for more than an hour at a time. Sansa had been a breath of fresh air, not even slightly afraid of his rages and sulks, and yet somehow more respectful of his need for physical distance than anyone else had been.

"How old is the Stark girl?"

This is the question he's been dreading from the moment he gave in. This is the question that he's seen coming from the moment he realised he felt something other than admiration of Sansa's skill when he saw her on the wards. He's felt like a dirty old man, and even Sansa insisting that he's not hasn't been enough. Even her teases that she  _likes_ older men, even her assuring him that it isn't really much of an age gap, it hasn't helped. Not without her here, in front of him, saying the words.

"She's twenty," he admits. "That's not a huge-"

"Seven years is  _enough,"_ Dad says. "Oh,  _Willas."_

 

_Before_

 

"There's not a full week between our ages," Willas says dreamily, head tipped over the back of his chair, tie hanging open over his chest. "She wants me to come to Dragonstone over the holidays, starting Boxing Day - do you think Mum and Dad will let me skip out on going to the High Tower?"

Garlan and Loras' silence is enough to make him lift his head, because it's so painfully unlike them to be quiet. They're looking at him as if he's grown a head, or as if his elbow is up near his ear again, like it was the last time he came off his broom, during the Gryffindor game.

"But you  _love_ Boxing Day with Pop and Nana," Loras says, in the voice he usually reserves for devastating Quidditch losses. He sounds _betrayed._  "You're the one who's always rushing us out the door at the slightest chance of a visit to the High Tower - what's going on, Will?"

Willas shrugs, glad Margaery isn't here because she can always see through him, and they'll all laugh if he tells them he loves Rhaenys. He does, though, she's  _wonderful,_ and he wishes people could look past her last name and see her for herself. He knows what it's like, kind of, because the Tyrell name is a heavy weight, even if it's not  _quite_ as heavy as  _Targaryen._

"I'm going to be an adult next year," he says, forcing down his temper - he's never had much of a temper, but the stress of sixth year has been hitting him harder than he expected. He's been careful not to take it out on his friends and family, to save it for the Quidditch pitch, but it's been there for the last couple of months. The only person he's been able to talk about it with is Rhaenys, because no one else would understand. Rhaenys does, though - if anyone is going to understand anger, it's Rhaenys, who was raised by her father, in her grandparents' house. "Maybe it's time I stopped, you know, doing everything as part of the family - I'm allowed to branch out a little, Lorry."

"Be that as it may," Garlan says, visibly worried, "this isn't like you at  _all._ "

Willas  _hates_ being worried about. He hates it when Mum fusses over him, hates when Pop writes him concerned letters over every mishap on the pitch or in the air, he absolutely hates it - he's the oldest, but since school started back this year it's as if everyone thinks he's a baby, and it all seems to be because he's gotten close to Rhaenys.

"Listen," Willas says, a little annoyed that they're being such absolute wet blankets about this, because he's always the one stepping in when they ask Mum and Dad for something they know is likely to get refused, and it would be nice if they could return the favour just this bloody once, "I want to spend time with my girlfriend - what's wrong with that?"

"Well," Amarys says, slipping into the seat beside him with, for some reason, her red-and-gold tie wrapped around her head. "We all think you're going a little  _fast,_ Will. That's all."

In all honesty, if he were anyone else, if  _Rhaenys_ were anyone else, Willas would agree - but he is himself, and she is herself, and this, whatever is between them - it's  _different_. They are  _different._

"Marys," he says, as patiently as he can manage, because Amarys and her twin, Arys, were born on the same day as Willas. They have been his closest friends since infanthood, his mother is Amarys' godmother and Amarys' mother is his godmother, and they couldn't be closer. The very last thing he wants is to fall out with Amarys even a little, but she hasn't been able to see the good in Rhaenys, not even a little. "It's going at the right pace. Do you think one of us is forcing it? Is that it?"

"I know you'd never do anything like that, Will," Amarys says firmly. "I know  _you,_ Will - there's a reason you've never had even a very casual girlfriend. You think taking things at an absolutely  _glacial_ pace is the right thing to do. You told me that yourself! You said your aunt Malora told you that the right way to treat a girl is very carefully, so-"

"I'm not sticking my hand up her robes, Marys," Willas says, his temper rising once again. "And she's not sticking  _her_ hand down my trousers, either, if that's your next guess!"

Amarys looks suitably cowed by that, but Garlan seems to be rising to the challenge. Why it even  _is_ a challenge escapes Willas, since Rhaenys has been nothing but a perfect pupil -  _why else would she be a prefect_   _for goodness' sake -_ and has gone out of her way to make friends with Willas' friends. 

"Should my ears be burning?"

Speak of the Devil.

Rhaenys loops her arms over his shoulders, leaning her chin right on top of his head, and he just knows that she's smiling - she's  _always_ smiling, except for when it's just the two of them, when they're lying together in the grass by the lake or sitting in one of the hundreds of little alcoves all over the school or, once or twice, curled together in his bed in the dorm when the rest of the lads are elsewhere. Those are the times when they talk about things like the anger, or the weight of expectation on first-born children, or the sheer  _annoyance_ of being a scion of the stupid blood Sacred Twenty-Eight.

"All kindness, I assure you," Arys says, settling on the arm of Amarys' chair, his red-and-gold tie also tied around his head. He rests his arm around the back of Amarys' chair almost protectively, and Willas feels his temper  _snap_ right to the surface.

Rhaenys senses it too, obviously, because she starts scratching her fingers up and down over his heart, just right to sooth him.

"I'm glad," she laughs, moving to mirror Arys' position, sitting on the right arm of Willas' chair but crossing her legs so her robes split and her instep is rubbing against the inside of his left knee. "I'd so hate to think any of you thought ill of me."

Loras and Garlan have the thinnest smiles in the world, and Arys still looks very slightly suspicious - but Amarys, by some miracle, looks sincerely pleased, looks  _friendly._

"Professor Lannister is looking for us," Rhaenys says to him, pressing an absent-minded kiss to his temple. "Something about prefects or... I don't know, I missed part of it because Viserys kicked up a stink over missing Chess Club or Charms Club or whatever club the girl he fancies this week is part of and Lannister predictably had no patience for that."

"I'll be right there," Willas promises her, relaxing under that gentle stroking of her fingers against his shirt front. "I just need to find my-"

"Badge?" she guessed, dangling it in front of his face with a smile. "You left it behind after that bloody run Aurane forced us on this morning."

"So I did," he remembered suddenly. "Come on, then, he hates being kept waiting."

Amarys even waves goodbye to Rhaenys, which is good - she must have taken his reassurances to heart, which is more than his brothers or sister have done.

 

**Now**

 

“Dad’s told us about your having,” Garlan says, stopping to try and find the right word, “um,  _ feelings _ for Sansa Stark.”

“I fucked her in my office downstairs,” Willas says bluntly, “and I think I might be in love with her.”

Margaery cracks up laughing, so hard that she puts down her cardboard cup of tea so she can cling to the end of his bed, doubled over, unimpeded. Loras looks like he's been slapped, and Garlan...

"I never thought I'd see the day," he says, settling into the chair by Willas' bed, probably still warm from Dad's arse. "Tell me about her, Will."

Garlan did this before, when Willas went to Pop and asked from Granny's ring so he could give it to Rhaenys. When he'd fully realised that there was something wrong but hadn't figured out what it was.

Willas had barely been able to string together two words about Rhaenys beyond _"but I love her, I want to marry her."_

"She makes me want to try," Willas says, reaching over so he and Garlan can catch one another by the wrists. "She's a beautiful dancer, and cries when we can't help a patient, but only when we're away from the ward. She- she likes scrambled eggs but hates boiled, and she can't abide to wear wrinkled robes."

"Sounds about right," Marg says, having resurfaced from her fit of mirth. "What an excellent choice, Will. I heartily approve."

"Dad says I can't see her," he says. "Do you know why?"

They exchange a look that reminds him far too much of when last he was in hospital, which leaves his stomach in knots. 

"What's wrong?" he asks. "Is it her curse-scars?"

"Will," Garlan says, squeezing his wrist. "The reason you can't see her is because it's been almost a week, and Sansa hasn't woken up yet."


	5. Crashing

**Now**

"Your idiot father is afraid that the Starks are going to have you arrested for fiddling with their daughter," Granny says, tapping into his room with a grin. "I think they should be thanking you for giving her an alternative to that loathsome Baratheon boy."

"You're too kind," he says, dry as a bone, and offers her his cheek to kiss - which she does, with relish. "The school hasn't fallen down without Professor Tully, then?"

"And it won't without me, for an afternoon," she promises him. "If it does, I'll scold it right back up again, don't you worry about that."

He hesitates, wondering if he wants the honesty Granny is so infamous for, and decides to be brave. His leg is still bleeding, his bones still shake with phantom pains, and Sansa's screams are echoing in the back of his head, and he needs to be brave.

"What's everyone saying?"

"The general consensus," Granny says, "is that Aerys risked everything to get Rhaella and the boy back, sent in his bulldog-"

"You know I hate when you call her that, Gran," he sighs. "She has a name."

"I refuse to acknowledge any feelings you bear toward that woman except rage," Granny says firmly. "Aerys sent in his bulldog, and she targeted what she saw as the softest, highest-impact targets. The crippled boy and the girl who got herself cut up by Tywin's grandson."

"Thanks, Gran."

"I do my best," she says, smiling savagely while taking a massive box of biscuits out of her tiny handbag. "Now - you also need to be mindful that plenty of people are  _also_ saying that the bulldog went for you out of revenge and went for the girl out of jealousy. People remember you proposing to Rhaenys, Willas. They remember you Blasting half your leg off, and they remember all the rumours about  _why."_

"They're right," he admits. "Rhaenys came directly for Sansa - she avoided her uncle and circled around Arwyn to get to us, and then she ignored me when I tried to talk her down."

"Who hit you, then?"

"Joff Baratheon," he says, "for much the same reasons as Rhaenys attacked Sansa."

Granny sniffs and hands him two of those little Viennese whirl tasting things with the chocolate in the middle. They're his favourites, but they're also Marg's favourites, so Willas usually ends up with the chocolate fudge creams instead. Granny tries to make sure that it isn't  _painfully_ obvious that Marg is her favourite, sometimes, and she's also absolutely weak when any of them are poorly.

"This is a disaster," Granny says, tugging a teapot from her bag next, and then two cups and a sugar bowl. "But we will make the best of it. It's proved Rhaenys is insane, which means no one will question her being held here at the hospital instead of in Azkaban. It's proved Aerys is losing his grip, because now everyone  _knows_ we have Rhaella and the boy out. It's proved that we're stronger than they thought, because the outer doors of the hospital smashed, but the doors to the wards weren't even scratched."

That's good, at least - he hasn't been able to get decent report on the attack from anyone at all. Typical Granny, to slip it in like it's nothing of importance.

 

_Then_

 

"I don't know, Professor," Willas insists. "I swear, Professor Tully, I do not  _know."_

Some little girl, a first or second year from Ravenclaw, has reported him for hexing her. Willas has never raised his wand against someone outside of Duelling Club in his life, and knows he wasn't down on the lawn outside Greenhouse Five at lunchtime because he was with Rhaenys.

Wasn't he?

"I don't remember," he says. "Professor Tully, I'm sorry, I was- I was with my girlfriend. I'm sure of it. You can talk to Rhaenys, she'll vouch for me-"

"Miss Targaryen," Professor Tully says, leaning back in her very elegant way. She's head of Hufflepuff, teaches Charms, deputy headmistress and the youngest teacher on staff except Professor Baratheon, and probably the object of too many puppy-love crushes over her time in the school. She's a damn good teacher, too, clever and interesting and engaging, and most of all -  _fair._ "Yes, she's involved in this as well - she's with Professor Lannister at the moment."

Willas almost asks if their head of house shouldn't be handling this, but the idea of being trapped in a small room with Granny while a little girl is accusing him of trying to do her harm is horrifying. At least Professor Tully isn't likely to beat him over the head with a two-inch round rosewood walking stick with a steel butt.

"Professor, I- you could pour Veritaserum down my throat and I wouldn't be able to tell you a thing about this, I swear. I wasn't out at the greenhouses-"

"Then where were you?" she asks, and Willas almost swallows his tongue. "Willas, you're an outstanding student, and there isn't a teacher in this school who doubts that you'll do both us and Saint Mungo's proud next year, but there have been so many oddities in the past two months that we're starting to become... Concerned."

 _Concerned._ Mum and Dad keep telling him they're concerned, too, and Garlan, and Lorry, and Marg, and Arys and Amarys. Everyone is concerned outside of Rhaenys and... 

Aurane, too, and Arianne doesn't seem  _too_ worried, but, well, Willas himself is a little worried. He's been having temper issues because of the stress of N.E.W.T. classes and prefect duty and Quidditch captaining and all the rest, but he's never forgotten an entire afternoon before. He's never been worried that he might have  _hexed a child_ before.

He's an  _adult!_ He, he got a watch for his birthday in August, he's seventeen, he's an adult and he's going to be a  _Healer_ and he has never raised his wand against anyone outside of Duelling Club before and-

"Head down, Willas," Professor Tully is saying, and she sounds as if she's half a mile away, at the end of a tunnel. "There's no need to panic, Willas, we just want to speak with you, we just want to know-"

"I didn't  _hurt_ anyone, Professor," he manages, clenching the arms of the chair and trying very hard not to  _cry,_ he is seventeen years old, he is prefect of Slytherin house and captain of the Slytherin Quidditch team, he's a member of the Duelling Club and the Charms Club and the Chess Club, he's- he's going to be a Healer! He  _doesn't hurt people!_  

Professor Tully leaves him sitting there at her desk until he stops shaking, steps out of her office and disappears for long enough that she's surely gone to Lannister's office to discuss expelling him for something that can't have happened - but he can't  _remember lunchtime,_ so maybe it did!

"Willas?"

He looks up, and Professor Tully is there again. 

"It wasn't you," she tells him. "Little Meredyth has said it was a blonde boy, Willas. It wasn't you."

Aurane. Aurane took his prefect badge after training, running out of the changing room with his broom in one hand and Willas' badge in the other, as fast on the ground as he is sneaky in the air.

Would Aurane hurt a child? Would  _any_ of them? Willas thought he knew his friends, thought he knew the lads who've lived with him for nine months of the year for the past seven years, but does he?

"Go ahead, Willas," Professor Tully says, "you're free to go."

Rhaenys is waiting outside the door for him, against the opposite wall, one foot planted against the wall so her robes are splitting - she has beautiful legs, and likes to show them off to him. Usually, he finds them distracting, but right now he just feels sick. He wants to find Garlan and Lorry and Marg, and maybe go to Granny's office, and he wants to Floo Mum and Dad, and he wants to Floo Arwyn, and Uncle B, and he wants to go lie face down on a couch and have Marys tell him terrible jokes while Arys complains that Arianne won't look twice at him.

"I can't be here right now, Rhaenys," he says. "I can't- they thought I'd hurt a kid, Rhae! A little girl!"

Then it hits him - Meredyth _._ That horrible, awful name, poor Merry hates it, and Willas knows that because he and Marys used to babysit her and all of Marg's other friends over the holidays. 

"I'm going-"

He lunges away, racing for the nearest bathroom, and he only gets as far as the sink before he vomits. 

"Ah," he tries, and then takes a deep breath. " _Aguamenti."_

He rinses and rinses and rinses, the sink and his mouth and his face and the insides of his wrists, but his hands just won't stop shaking until Garlan comes in and covers them with his own.

"I didn't-"

"We know, Will," Garlan says, and Lorry is there too. "We know - but we need to talk about this."

 

**Now**

 

"It's going to be weeks before your leg is healed enough for a new plate to be fitted," Arwyn says, sitting on the bed, holding his right hand. Mum is sitting on the other side of the bed, holding his left hand. He feels safer with the two of them than he would with anyone else in the world, except maybe Marys and Garlan's Leo, who is very small, but terrifying.

"I know that, Arwyn," he says. "I'm a Healer too, and I've been in more or less this position before."

"This isn't as severe as it was then," Mum says, patting his hand. "But you can move home while you're on crutches-"

"Not happening," he says, squeezing her fingers to soften the blow. "What else?"

"I'm going to recommend you see Healer Dayne again," Arwyn says, pressing her hand over his mouth with a smile. "I know you didn't like having to see her, but-"

"Ashara did help," he admits. "Although I'm not sure-"

"You've been tortured, sweetheart," Mum says, teary-eyed behind her bottle-bottom glasses. "Please see Healer Dayne. For me?"

Mum isn't as jumpy about this all as Dad is, and has spent most of the past week fighting with the Department of Magical Law Enforcement about upping security on the hospital - she's never gone into government, but she's lobbied for everything she believes in since she was sixteen, and Willas doesn't think there's a departmental head in the Ministry who doesn't dread her coming, even if it's just on Dad's arm at a party.

Working helps her focus, helps her not think about things. Willas is more like her than he is like Dad, even if he's the spitting image of Dad. He understands that. He still half wishes she'd had a little more time for him over the past nine days, that's all.

"Alright," he concedes. "What else, Arwyn?"

"That's more or less it," she promised. "If it weren't for the curse scars, and for this being a repeat of past injuries, I'd be happy to let you go home - but you know how hard it is to stave off infection in open curse scars."

"Yes, Arwyn," he says. "Again, I am a Healer too."

"Rude," Mum chides, but she's smiling. "Wynny, could we have a moment?"

"If he's going to behave, of course," Arwyn says. "Are you going to behave?"

"I'll do my best," he promises, and Arwyn kisses him on the forehead before darting out the door.

"Now," Mum says. "Tell me how it was, seeing Rhaenys again."

 

_Then_

 

"It's been almost six weeks since we saw one another," Rhaenys wheedles, leaning all over him, threading her fingers through his hair, rubbing her cheek against his, trailing her instep up the back of his calf.

"I understand that, Rhaenys," he says, shrugging when her hand starts running down his chest, "but I have work to do - I have rounds with your uncle in the morning, and he abhors both lateness and hangovers."

"There are potions for hangovers-"

"No, Rhaenys," he says. "I have rounds. I have studying to do. I can't go to any parties, or, or knee's ups, or shindigs, or anything else."

"Not even a soirée?" she coaxes, stroking over his heart the way she used to, to calm him down. He's had a better hold on his temper since, well, he isn't sure since when, but the past few months have been a lot easier than he thought they'd be. "Come  _on_ , Willas,  _please-"_

"Rhaenys,  _no!"_

Somehow, the next morning, he has a raging hangover, is nearly late for his rounds, and has earned a black mark from Doran Martell, head  _fucking_ Healer of Saint Mungo's and the man who will ultimately decide whether or not Willas qualifies as a Healer. 

"I'm sorry, Healer," he says, jelly-legged with a hangover and hating himself for giving in to Rhaenys, even if he doesn't  _remember_ giving in to her. "It won't happen again."

"Tyrell," Healer Martell says. "No, I know your reputation. I don't think it will, if you have anything to say about it."

The next week, a ban is instituted on visitors in the trainees' quarters. Willas gets as far as the week after Christmas without being late for his rounds with Healer Martell again, and the next time is because he gets snowed in at Highgarden.

Rhaenys keeps convincing him to do things he knows are bad ideas, though, and that worries him. 

 

**Now**

 

"It's going to take a little getting used to," he admits, "but I can manage. You don't need to hover on either side of me."

Mum and Dad take sheepish steps back, and Willas very carefully doesn't roll his eyes, because that always hurts Mum's feelings.

Still, it's hard - less than a fortnight ago, he was marching up and down these halls with first-year trainees on his heels, and now he's clicking very slowly up and down on his old crutches, with one leg of his pyjamas sewn up very rapidly by a flick of Marg's wand.

"Don't you all have jobs?" he says over his shoulder. Garlan doesn't, not really, because his job is to run the family businesses and keep the family lands under watch. Lorry has training but he can move around his training schedule to fit in more visits - the Falcons have always been very understanding about things like that - and Marg seems to make her own hours, which does make Willas wonder if she really works for the DMLE or if she's a bloody Unspeakable.

But Dad is  _Minister for Magic,_ he has to go and sit on council meetings and chair Wizengamot hearings and all those other boring political things he has to do. He shouldn't be here, pottering up and down a corridor in Saint Mungo's with Willas-

Margaery is talking to Sansa's brother when he turns to make another pass.

"Robb, wait," Marg says, because Robb Stark is about to walk away. He does wait - he was Head Boy when Marg was Head Girl, wasn't he? - but he doesn't look happy about it. 

"I just want to know how she is," Willas says as soon as he's close enough that it isn't a shout. "Sansa and I are- we're close. Please."

"We know all about how close you are," Robb says, jaw clenched tight. "Joy told us."

Joy? Who's- Oh, bollocks. Jocelyn Lannister. Joy. Sansa's closest friend among the trainees. The Lannister Bastard. She's been seeing Jon Targaryen, hasn't she? Jon Targaryen who has the Targaryen name and absolutely nothing else to do with the family because he's a fucking  _Stark._

"I just want to know how she is," he says again. "I know how the protocol works, I know I'm not allowed to ask for an official report. I just want to know- last I was told, she hadn't even woken up. That's extreme. Please."

"What would you know about it?" Stark says, lunging forward, stopped only by Marg's iron-bar straight arm. "What the  _fuck-"_

"I've been in her shoes!" Willas snaps. "I've been the one lying in a coma because of a Cruciatus coming from a  _fucking_ dragonbone wand, except I was  _worse,_ because my mind was riddled with holes from eight fucking years of the woman I thought I loved  _controlling me with the Imperius Curse!"_

 

_then_

 

Willas wakes up very, very slowly. It feels like it's taking about a week, and then he forces his eyes open, and there's Dad, snoring into the Prophet.

Saint Mungo's. He knows those odd little ceiling tiles. He doesn't hurt anywhere, doesn't have any obvious bandages or casts or stitches, so he must assume that he's been in a coma because of...

Because of  _Viserys._ That was Viserys, behind that dragon mask, with that dragonbone wand, with its dragon heartstring core, with his sleeve rolled up to expose the red-and-black scales branded into his forearm.

That was Rhaenys' uncle, her  _friend._ Willas thought that Viserys was  _his_ friend, but obviously not.

He's wearing one of those horrible gowns they give patients in comas, who need to be washed and turned so they don't get bedsores, and he hopes Mum will bring him pyjamas.

He wonders if Garlan and Lorry and Marg are about to visit, or Arys and Amarys.

"Time to pee," he says to himself, grabbing his wand from the nightstand before swinging his legs out from under the blankets. "Time to... No."

Scales. Red and black scales. Branded into his skin, from knee to ankle on his left leg. 

No. No no no no no-

 _Merry Crane._ Was that the start of it? Or was there something more? 

This explains the short temper, the holes in his memory, his complete inability to say no to Rhaenys even when he distinctly remembers refusing to say yes. 

"She's been cursing me," he says, sick with fear and horror and  _no no no no no-_

"I am not one of them," he says, panic roiling in his gut. Dad is stirring behind him, and Willas can't. He can't be this. He is  _not_ this. He is a  _Healer,_ he has been working in an out-source clinic for Muggleborns and Squibs and half-bloods who have magical maladies but are afraid of the rising mania that's been souring the streets in London. "I am  _not."_

His wand is in his hand.

He has to be rid of the brand. He has to be. Rhaenys must have made him forget that he'd even gotten it - what else has she made him forget? What else has he  _done?!_

" _Confringo."_

Dad wakes right up when he starts to scream.


	6. Coalescing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Long overdue, a finale.

**Now**

Sansa is always pale, pale with silver-blue shadows under her river blue eyes, steel-blue veins inside her slender wrists, rich tourmaline blue robes against the sweep of her neck. 

Now, she looks not pale, but faded, and all her shades of blue have washed out to bruised-in grey.

“Has there been any change in her condition?” he asks Arwyn, barely above a whisper. His face feels hot, stinging with embarrassment at the way Sansa’s family are watching him, and like as not stinging with tears, too, because he feels as if Rhaenys reached inside him and hollowed him out when she chose to hurt Sansa. “Any sign…?”

“No, sweetheart,” Arwyn says, just as quiet and twice as gentle. “She’s sleeping away the pain. You’ve spent enough time on Spell Damage to know that that’s normal, Willas - you’ve been reminding me for days that you’re a Healer. Remember it now.”

He knows that it’s normal, that an attack as severe as what Sansa endured, inflicted by someone as experienced and as vicious as Rhaenys, can take up to  _ two _ weeks to heal - but it’s not just that. It’s the violent white of the bandage covering the upper right corner of her face, where her curse-scar obviously isn’t healing over again. It’s the limp set of her long fingers against the standard-issue pale lilac top blanket, when he’s so used to her hands moving, animated and sure as she speaks and laughs and works.

He swallows against the lump clogging his throat, fails, tries again.

“She will wake, sweetheart,” Arwyn says, squeezing his wrist, defiant against the tangible fury burning off Sansa’s father and oldest brother and oldest uncle. “You’ll see.”

The lump sits right at the top of his throat, heavy on the back of his tongue, and he can only nod. 

“Come away, Willas,” Arwyn suggests. “I’ll have Lysa come and speak with you, how’s that?”

He nods again, because there’s not much else he can do. Sansa’s family obviously don’t think much of him, and given what little they know - or what little they’ve assumed, he supposes - he can hardly blame them. He wants so badly to sit by her bedside, to hold her soft hand until it becomes strong again, but knows that he can’t - her parents are sitting by either side of the head of her bed, her oldest and youngest brothers looming over the backs of their chairs, and there is nothing but suspicion in the sea of grey-and-blue eyes before him, save maybe a little contempt. He admires their reserve, really, because had he been the one comatose thanks to Joffrey Baratheon, and Sansa had come to see him, he can imagine precisely how Dad would have lost the plot.

“If I had thought Rhaenys would hurt her,” he says, staring at the surprising flash of silver against the dark blue silk of Sansa’s nightgown - a smooth, round pendant of silver and moonstone, on a slim, sturdy chain long enough to hide under her robes for work, the only gift he had dared to give her for her birthday, because if they were found out, she could be thrown out of the training programme and he could be fired - and hoping the lump in his throat doesn’t render his words unintelligible. “If I had thought Rhaenys would hurt Sansa, I would have killed her.”

Arwyn’s hand goes to his wrist again, squeezes so hard it hurts, but Professor Tully is looking at him even harder than that.

“I’ve known you since you were eleven years old, Willas,” she says, the words scraping up her throat to hit him like a slap. “You haven’t got it in you to kill anyone, not without Rhaenys Targaryen holding your hands.”

He leaves then, without another word, and is torn.

Until Rhaenys raised her wand to Sansa, he would have agreed with Professor Tully. He went into Healing specifically because the idea of inflicting pain on another makes him sick, loved Duelling Club at school because he had such a flair for defensive charmwork that even Professor Tully, famous for her own talent in that very field, had complimented him on it. Willas is good, painfully so,  _ embarrassingly  _ so, considering he’s a Slytherin old boy, and he would never kill anyone.

Or so he thought, until he saw Rhaenys lift her wand and point it at Sansa.

_then_

“It’s not that we don’t trust you,” he says over his shoulder, knowing she’ll follow. “It’s that  you don’t trust you, Sansa. You doubt your instincts far too much for us to allow you independent rounds-”

“But I’m the  best!” she snaps, striding along to catch him up. “You know I am, Willas, I’m better than Joy or Monterys by a longshot, and Durran is too shaky-handed to keep up with me-”

“But you stop believing that as soon as you step onto the ward,” he says evenly, pushing open the door of his office and motioning her in ahead of him. “You’re a remarkably dedicated student, Sansa, but until you start accepting that you do know-”

She slams the door of his office shut behind him, and then pushes him against it as hard as she can. He’s grinning when his carefully gathered reports and files hit the floor at her feet, gorgeous and thrilled and, in this moment, hers.

“Lock the door,” she says against that beautiful mouth, and he presses his hand over the lock and turns, so only he can unlock it. “Willas-”

He’s kissing her before she can manage anything more, hands cupping her face and lean body pressing forward to meet hers. Why was he pressed against the door, she wondered fuzzily, why wasn’t she caught between the door and his wonderful body?

“Desk,” he says into her mouth, “get on the desk, on my side, thank you-”

Somehow, they reach his desk, never stopping kissing, and he has her robes hiked up her thighs before he remembers to reach around for his chair.

Then he sits down, and dives between her thighs. The firm heat of his tongue against her knickers is so exquisite that she forgets to pull her robes the rest of the way up, so she can watch. Instead, she falls back across the taut moss-green leather of his desktop, twists her fingers into her own hair, and tries very hard not to be loud.

It’s impossible, though, because he bloody well  Vanishes her knickers , and then his tongue is hot and busy right there against her body without even a shred of cotton to mute it-

“Don’t scream,” he says, two fingers sinking into her like a dream and white teeth flashing above her cunt in a smile like sin, “or we’ll be buggered.”

She tucks her arm over her mouth and bites down hard against the inside of her elbow, almost sobbing when he dips back down and fits his mouth against her, lips and tongue to her clit while his fingers, oh, his fingers, curl up, up, up, and sink deep, deep, deep.

She comes so hard that even biting down on her arm can’t quite keep her quiet. The Christmas holidays were far too long, and with the way he’d been working, she hadn’t been able to sneak away to see him even once.

He guides her down into his lap, laughing under his breath when she slumps, heavy and boneless, against the firm spread of his chest. By the time he’s nudged her mouth up to his for a kiss, she has his trousers open, her hand under his underpants, and he’s gasping her name against her lips. 

It’s not enough. It’s too much. It’s all they have, for now.

 

**Now**   


 

Marg whirls into his room with a neat little bag not unlike Granny’s looped over her elbow, and he’s so surprised that he leaves his filter somewhere over his shoulder.

“Are you an Unspeakable?” he asks, watching her settle elegantly on the ugly chair by the side of his bed and begin to pull, just like Granny, a teapot and cups and saucers from that tiny bag. “I know you can’t tell me outright, since that would defeat the purpose of  _ being  _ an Unspeakable, but you’ve hardly spent any time at work since I’ve been here, and I can’t imagine the Department of Magical Law Enforcement would be so generous with compassionate leave for a desk grunt-”

“Two things,” she says, tugging a case of neatly divided tea bags from her little bag. “First of all, the head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement is  _ Joanna Lannister,  _ who is quite aware that my brother having been tortured by her grandson gives me a little more leverage than she’d like.” Then she grins. “As for the Department of Mysteries, well, their head of department is  _ Rhaegar Targaryen,  _ who has not been seen in the office for nearly six months, so they’re all more or less doing what they want, unless Connie or V gives them an explicit mission. Or so I’ve heard, anyway.”

_ Connie or V,  _ meaning Jon Connington or Varys - last or possibly first name unknown, no one is sure - the two most dangerous men in England. Wonderful. Of course Margaery is on close terms with them.

“Secondly,” she says, “we are not here to talk about me.”

“We?”

Garlan and Loras lean around the door, looking guiltier than they really need to, all things considered. He’s glad to see them, if only because he still feels sick with guilt, weighed down by the press of Sansa’s family staring him out of her room, and having Margie and their brothers nearby will help. Probably.

“Arwyn told Mum about your little excursion,” Garlan says, throwing himself down into the spare chair, leaving the gap where the rest of Willas’ leg ought to be on the bed for Loras. “Mum and Dad are absolutely fuming, of course, because Arwyn also made sure we all knew that the Starks were… Less welcoming than they might have been.”

“As if I deserve a  _ welcome _ ,” he says, rolling his eyes and accepting a cup of tea from Marg. “She wouldn’t be in that bed if not for me, Garlan-”

“She’s going to wake up tomorrow morning.”

All four of them turned, stunned, to find the source of this new voice. Just barely inside the door of his room sat - well, it had to be Sansa’s brother, with that hair and that face, serious and thoughtful, and that wheelchair. Bran. He was Sansa’s favourite, even if she’d never admit it. 

“I should have introduced myself yesterday,” he said, smiling a little, seeming shy. “But I couldn’t get around the others in my chair, so here I am.”

“Alone?” Willas asks. “I can’t imagine your parents are pleased about that.”

“Mum and Dad are a bit highly strung at the moment,” Bran says easily, wheeling further into the room. “And Arya is covering for me, anyway. She’s telling Mum that I need to get something repaired on my chair.”

Garlan and Loras both stand up, looking suspicious, but Marg settles in, reaching into her pretty little bag to withdraw another mug. 

“It’s nothing personal,” Bran says. “Mum knows you, she’s just a little wary of anyone who has anything to do with Sansa that hasn’t been vetted by Aunty Lya, that’s all.”

“Your aunt Lysa could vouch for me,” Willas points out, and almost regrets it. Lysa’s teased him enough for pining after Sansa, but she doesn’t know that he and Sansa have been sleeping together for months now. No one knew, until Rhaenys took one look at Willas putting himself between her and Sansa and figured it out.

Even if half their relationship and more had been very literally cursed, there still isn’t a person in the world who knows him as well as Rhaenys Targaryen does, and the thought makes him nauseous. 

“She has,” Bran assures him, taking the mug from Marg with a smile. “But Mum thinks Lysa’s a bit flighty, so she doesn’t take her very seriously.”

That’s… Startling. Lysa is a delight, shrill and flustered, yes, but also a hurricane of affection when she decides she likes you, and one of the most committed Healers Willas has had the pleasure of working with. He’s liked her enormously since the day they met, and she mothers him almost as much as Arwyn does.

“Your aunt Lyanna had an affair with a married man straight out of school,” Margaery says, sipping her tea with a sharp grin inherited directly from Granny. “Does she escape being labelled  _ flighty  _ simply for being an Auror?”

“Probably,” Bran says, with that enduring good-naturedness Sansa always speaks of so fondly. “But I’m not here to talk about my aunts, I’m here to talk about my sister, and your intentions toward her, Healer Tyrell.”

“He wants to marry her,” Margaery says, making Loras splutter and Garlan groan and Willas blush, from the roots of his hair well down past his collar. “Oh, come now, surely you can all see it? He’s mad for her, it’s plain as the nose on his face.”

“Thank you for that, Margaery,” he says, dry as he can manage with his face burning. “What is it you meant, Bran?”

“Well, that you intend on marrying her,” Bran says, shrugging. “I Saw it, but I’m not wholly convinced that my Sight is reliable, considering how… Vague it can be.”

“I’m mostly concerned with her getting better for now,” Willas says, leaning forward over his legs. “I’d like to help with her recovery, but, well, I can’t be involved. I’ll do well to keep my job, since Rhaenys has likely been raving about Sansa and I to anyone who’ll listen, and I’ve been in no fit state to keep things under wraps since the attack-”

“Aunt Lysa and Healer Oakheart have been fighting with Healer Martell since yesterday morning about your position in the hospital,” Bran offers helpfully. “I think it’ll go in your favour, if only because your and Sansa’s closeness hasn’t impacted either of your work, and you’ve never shown her any favouritism.”

Willas blinks at Bran, wondering how in Merlin’s name he knows that, and Sansa’s brother blushes just the same way she does when she’s been caught out.

“Arya is very adept at listening at keyholes without being caught,” he admits. “We’ve been trying to keep on top of all the news, even if Robb’s being a complete berk about it all and Mum and Dad are half-mad for lack of sleep. Aunt Lya likes what she knows of you, for what it’s worth, but Uncle Brandon hates you because he hates everyone who goes near Sansa or Arya, and Dad listens to Brandon.”

Another of those eloquent shrugs, and Bran’s smiling again.

“He’ll come around, though,” he says, tapping his temple. “I’m sure of it.”

 

* * *

Sansa did wake up the next morning, very slowly.

And then, as soon as she was fully awake, she began to panic.

So Arwyn tells Willas when she stops in at lunchtime, her masses of hair bundled up on top of her head and held in place mostly by her wand. 

“We had to put her under just so Ashara could check her over, make sure there was no lasting damage that we’d not thought to look for,” she says, sitting on the edge of his bed and shaking her head. Her hands are still and sure, the consummate Healer even here, and Willas is terrified of what she’s going to say. “There’s not, sweetheart, before you fret yourself into an early grave - she’s done all the healing she needs while she was out, as far as we can tell, but she didn’t know the time that had passed, and she woke up alone in a fourth floor room. She panicked, and I can’t say I blame her. She probably thought she’d been left there out of the way, and we were still fighting.”

“Can I-”

“Not unless her family says so,” Arwyn says, patting his knee once in the most efficiently comforting move he’s ever seen. “You know that, Willas. But she  _ is  _ going to get better. The biggest difficulty, aside from keeping her calm, will be forcing that scar on her face to close up.”

His leg has been giving them trouble as well, the uneven end of his thigh weeping and bleeding far more than it should have - but there isn’t much they can do for curse-damage, not the way they can for hexes and jinxes and bites and mundane injuries. Curses scar, and if the scars open up, well, it’s unpleasant for everyone involved.

“Please, Arwyn,” he says. “Please. Speak to her mother. Please?”

“I can’t, Willas, and you know that, too,” she says. “You’re lucky to still have your jobs, I can’t risk either of you losing out just to let you watch her sleep.”

“I’ll arrange it that you can visit her when you’re both released,” Mum says, coming in and closing the door behind her. “She’ll be going home by the end of the week, according to her aunt.”

Lysa popped in last night to update him, telling him more or less exactly what Bran had, and it had made him smile to see her getting angry on his behalf.

“I’m going to be barred from Winterfell for despoiling her,” he points out, beyond embarrassment at everyone and their goats knowing that he’s been sleeping with Sansa, “and she won’t be up to much travelling - how are we going to see one another?”

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” Mum says, the steely determination that gets her her way in the halls of the Ministry settling in the jut of her jaw. “Don’t you worry about that, poppet.”

 

 

_then_

“We’re going to have to be so  careful  when we…”

Willas looks down at her, watching as her eyes go wide and pensive, her fingers tangled with the chain of the necklace he’d given her just the day before. They shouldn’t be lingering like this, because if they’re caught in his room - barely a room, really, a cupboard with a narrow bed and a tiny window where he can catch a snooze between one fifteen hour shift ending and the next day beginning, every full Healer has one in the hospital just in case - he’ll have to give an explanation, and there isn’t one. There really isn’t. Any business between himself and Sansa can and indeed should be conducted in his office. They’re not going to be given dispensation just because he’s her mentor now. Doran and Arwyn will probably be ten times as hard on them because he’s her mentor now, truth be told, and his stomach drops sickeningly at the thought.

“Love,” he says, nudging her to sit up, staying close as they rise. “We might need to keep this between just us even beyond your qualifying.”

She tips in closer still, pressing her brow to his neck and breathing deep. 

“I know,” she admits, taking her hand from her necklace to tunnel under his robes and his shirt to touch his skin. “I just wish things were different.”

The senior Healers wouldn’t be arriving for another hour and a half or more - Willas himself only had to stay on last night because Jaime Lannister was dumped on their doorstep, screaming and howling and bleeding from the remainder of his right arm, and there isn’t a triage Healer in Europe to rival Willas, not with his deeply personal experience - but it’s still risky. Arwyn is notorious for arriving an hour early at least twice a week, just to make sure the junior Healers on the night shift haven’t started slacking as shift change comes up, and Lysa and Ashara are so good at just appearing. They’ve each nearly caught himself and Sansa out a dozen times in the past few months, and while he thinks Ashara might understand - she never has named Amelia’s father, after all - Lysa would be furious. He knows she would, and he can’t even blame her. 

If any of the others were sleeping with a trainee, he’d want them removed from the hospital. It’s a thousand times worse that it’s him, considering he’s personally responsible for the trainees.

“Do you think anyone will believe us?” she asks quietly, pulling herself out of his arms to start tidying herself up.  “Even if we wait a year, will they really believe that it didn’t start while I was a trainee?”

The worst of it is, it didn’t really seem to  start.  It was as if he was mostly oblivious to Sansa, and then all of a sudden he couldn’t stop noticing her. And now here they are.

“So long as they can’t prove anything,” he says, “we should be fine.”

 

**Now**   
  


Sansa wakes up a second time.

Her room is dark and quiet, Mum asleep in a chair to the right of her bed, Lysa and Arya murmuring quietly over some book or other in the corner. She doesn’t feel at all panicky now, now that she knows the battle is long past and none of the Healers died. None of her  _ friends  _ died.

Joy didn’t die. Lysa didn’t die.  _ Willas  _ didn’t die.

“Hello,” she says, her voice raspy and sore, and Arya laughs at the sound. Mum jerks awake, blinks a moment, and then just helps her sip a little water, visibly anxious. Lysa stands back, smiling, when Arya crowds in close and hugs her very carefully. “How is everyone?”

“They’re all fine,” Lysa says, before Mum and Arya can open their mouths. “Joy has a broken hip, Durran won’t have his voice back for another month, and Monterys is going to be on crutches for another few days while his leg finishes healing up, but they’re fine.”

Joy and Durran and Monterys are all that’s left of Sansa’s original class, and in six months, the four of them will move from tourmaline to lime green, and earn the title  _ Healer.  _

If they can heal up from this, at least. If the  _ hospital  _ can recover from this.

If Sansa isn’t removed from the programme.

“How am  _ I?” _ she asks. Nothing feels broken, but there are bandages over her eye - has her scar opened? New curses can reopen old scars, she’s seen it happen. She’s treated it, as much as it can be treated. “Anything besides this?”

“You’re rostered for as many sessions with Ashara as she has time for,” Lysa says, smiling just a little - there isn’t a Healer in the world likes being healed, least of all by Ashara, who does with words and quiet what the rest of them do with spells and potions. “And we’ll need to make sure there’s no nerve damage from the torture, but other than that, you’ve a clean bill of health, exhaustion notwithstanding.”

She flexes her fingers and her toes, lifts her arms over her head and feels weak, but functional.

“When can I go home?”

“You’ll be kept in a few more days, just in case you pick up an infection in your face when you start moving around,” Lysa says, apologies written all over her soft face. “Arwyn’s going round the twist trying to keep everyone who has to be here in their beds, so I hope you’ll go easy on her.”

“I’ll do my best,” Sansa says, as if Healer Oakheart doesn’t terrify her on a small, primal level, as much because she’s Willas’ godmother as because she’s the second-in-command in the whole hospital. “Who else is still here?”

“Doran’s bedridden - some of the nasty little beggers went for his chair, and caught his back. The Royce girl has some kind of rash that just won’t clear up without the counterhex, and there are half a dozen others here and there - none for you to worry about.”

“Lysa,” Sansa says, as firm as she dares considering the way Mum is watching her. “If my scar opened up, then…”

Lysa sighs, and Mum looks fit to burst. 

“He’s just down the hall,” Arya says, surprising Sansa. “Would you like me to fetch him?”

 

* * *

Willas looks thin and haggard when he appears in Sansa’s door, leaning on his crutches and wearing his glasses low on his nose. With his head down and his cheeks pink, he looks far younger, and she wishes she could reassure him that this is  _ good,  _ that even if she gets thrown out of the programme she can do a year in Paris and come back, and even if she can’t work in St. Mungo’s they’ll manage  _ something,  _ won’t they?

“I thought she’d killed you, until you opened your eyes,” he says, sinking down into the chair by her bedside. “You were so still, and there was so much blood-”

“I’m alright,” she assures him. “Look at me - I’m the picture of health!”

He laughs, but it doesn’t ring true. 

He flinches when she touches his hand.

“Willas,” she says, “Willas, look at me.”

When he looks up, she squeezes tight to his fingers. 

“This isn’t your fault,” she tells him. “Rhaenys would have come for us all regardless of her history with you, love. She’s made her feelings about my family abundantly clear, and besides - I was standing between her and her brother before you came anywhere near me.”

“She would have Stunned you, or cast you aside,” he says, raw and pained, “she wouldn’t have  _ tortured  _ you if I hadn’t given myself away.”

“You  _ didn’t  _ give yourself away,” Sansa insists. “You did what you  _ always _ do - you jumped in head-first, ready to do the grunt work. She wanted to annoy you, and it didn’t work how she expected. That’s all that was, love.”

“No it wasn’t,” he says, grim and determined to shoulder the blame. He’s always the same, swamped by guilt and refusing to allow her to take responsibility for anything that’s happened between them. “Sansa, Rhaenys… Rhaenys  _ knows  _ me. She helped  _ shape  _ me. I slipped up, and because of that, you…”

He traces the backs of two fingers along the lower edge of the bandage covering her eye, featherlight. 

“You’re hurt because of me,” he says, head dropping. “And there’s no way for me to atone for that, sweetheart.”

 

_then_

 

Willas is guiding her very carefully down the halls, his hand big and warm and gentle on her elbow. “This isn’t your fault, Sansa. You did all you could, and passed your patient into more experienced care as soon as it became apparent that their needs were beyond your abilities-”

“He  died , Willas,” she says, her voice sharp and hoarse. “I wasn’t good enough, and he  died,  because I’m so  stupid-”

“Enough,” Willas says firmly, nudging her into his office and closing the door behind them. “You’re far from stupid, Sansa, else you wouldn’t be here in the first place, and you’re a very talented Healer - but you’re not as experienced as Arwyn. That’s all. You  know  that’s all it is.”

“But he  died,  Willas!” she says, shaking now, and distantly aware that she’s crying. “He  died,  and I should have stopped it, I- I-”

She cries harder when he gathers her close, wrapping her up in his arms and holding her tight to his chest. She clutches at the front of his robes, trying not to cry too hard but unable to stop now she’s started. 

Willas holds her close, shushing and murmuring against her hair as she sobs,  running his hand up and down her back until eventually, she stops. Her breathing evens out, and the shock and terror of having lost a patient is sitting quietly in her gut instead of clawing out of her chest.

“I lost my first patient three months into the programme,” he says quietly. “So you’ve already proved yourself a better Healer than me, Sansa - you mustn’t blame yourself for this. It’s beyond-”

She kisses him without thinking, without considering the consequences - what if he isn’t interested? What if he reports her for harassment? What if-

He kisses her back. It’s untidy and a little unsure, because Sansa hasn’t kissed anyone since Joffrey and it feels like Willas might be out of practice, too, but that doesn’t matter.

“If we’re caught like this,” he says, barely moving away from her mouth, “we’ll both be kicked out.”

“I know,” she says, and kisses him again.

 

**Now**   


 

“I love your daughter, Professor Tully,” Willas said, as fierce as he could manage to be in his paisley pyjamas, on his crutches, with his hair half-combed and his dressing gown falling off one shoulder. “I know circumstances aren’t ideal-”

“Ideal!” Professor Tully scoffed. “Willas, you are her  _ teacher!” _

“I know,” he said, miserable. “And I’d be the first to push for anyone else to be removed from the hospital in these circumstances, but... “

“But?”

“But I’ve already tendered my resignation,” he admitted. “It isn’t fair to expect Sansa to leave when she’s so close to finishing the programme here, so I’m leaving. I’ll be in Paris for the next two years, Professor.”

He wasn’t going to be alone, of course - Humfrey was coming with him, and a very special guest, too, but no one was supposed to know that unless they  _ had _ to - but it was still going to be an  _ enormous  _ change. He was leaving everything behind just to prove a point, that it wasn’t just proximity and the imbalance between their positions in the hospital that had fostered his relationship with Sansa. He suspected her family would never accept them if they tried to just tough it out, and he knew she wouldn’t be able to bear being without them.

His special guest in Paris… Well, it showed that Doran Martell still trusted him, even with the situation with Sansa in mind. The Martells were just as clannish as the Tyrells or the Starks, and Doran wouldn’t trust just  _ anyone _ to watch over Aegon.

“You intend to keep up your relationship with Sansa while you’re abroad?”

“She has me until she tells me she doesn’t want me, Professor,” Willas said,  _ and probably a long while after that.  _

Professor Tully watched him carefully for a long while after that, and then sighed.

“I wish you well in Paris, Willas,” she said, sounding old in a way he’d never heard from her before. “But right now, I can’t wish you well with Sansa. You can understand that, can’t you?”

He could understand it, and that was the worst of it - he wanted their approval, but he couldn’t blame the Starks for withholding it. He would’ve done the same if some higher-up in the DMLE (or Department of Mysteries) had been presented to him as Margie’s lover.

 

* * *

“Paris,” she said, feeling a little queasy. “Willas, we always swore-”

“I know, love,” he cut in, taking her hands in his. Her face had finally stopped bleeding the day before, so she was being sent home - his leg must’ve stopped, too, since he was standing without his crutches. “I know what we swore, but this is a better way to go about it. Two years, and you’ll be established here, and I’ll come home.”

“It’s an awfully long time.”

His face fell just enough for her to notice it, and she pressed closer - they didn’t have long before Arya and Robb arrived to collect her, and while Arya had been nothing but supportive, Robb had been a total arse about the whole thing.

“If you’d rather we sort of… Call a halt until I get back-”

“No! No, that isn’t what I meant! Just that it’s unfair that we’re expected to wait for so long, given that Mum and Dad barely waited six months to start going out after she broke up with Uncle Brandon.”

“They were still in school, love,” he pointed out, smiling just the tiniest bit. “And besides, your dad wasn’t your mum’s teacher, was he?”

“I’m an  _ adult,  _ Willas,” she said fiercely. “It’s my decision to make, and I’ve decided on you. I don’t see why we need to justify that.”

He kissed her, slow and careful - her face was still tender, even if it had stopped bleeding, so she was grateful to him for that. 

“I hate it too, San,” he promised. “But I understand. And it’s not  _ that  _ long. Clíodhna will carry letters for us, if need be. We’ll cope.”

He kissed her again, and then Robb cleared his throat from the door. 

“We’ll be fine,” Willas said firmly, kissing her hands and going before she could tug him back for one last moment in his arms.

Robb lifted her bag. Arya tugged her by the wrist.

When she turned over her hand, she got a look at Willas’ parting gift, and laughed.

“Well,” Arya said, “maybe we’d best keep that hidden, until he gets back from Paris.”

An engagement ring, in white gold with those damnable Tyrell roses kissing up against the flush-set diamond trilogy. It was perfect. It was  _ typical.  _

She already missed him, but at least the hospital was still standing. At least  _ she  _ was still standing.

 


End file.
